Scene Two from a Novella

There is no mercy in the American night. Uncle Gregory used to drink a lot and oftentimes he’d talk a good deal when he drank and he was that singer of the honky tonks and bars and road houses. His life was where lonely men puked up lost souls in the carnage and vapor and steam and the neon of another shattered series of nonchalant and broken encounters of consciousness. He meandered through the wastelands, like some carnivorous dragon, bellowing and harping great lashes of fire and might, screaming injustice from his podium of steel noise. He pissed fire and shat blood and on the stage he ravaged the small crowds with words of loss and deeds of fumbling madness. Wore a black hat always, and stood far taller than the others in the band.

On Wednesday nights, far away from the crazed heat and slurring hypnosis of the performance, when all was quiet and gentle and kind, Gregory would come up to the trailer, up the lane where I lived then as a boy, looking for money, and without a smile to be found. Those were merry days and the birds sang often, and no cars came along the road all that often, and in the early evening da would watch baseball and we’d eat homemade fries and ride bikes or throw hard green apples at bees nests or something. Old grandma Bernice lived with us then, and she was hard and old but fun, and was Irish and raised me hard and Irish and could kick your ass for anything if she had a mind to. Her grandfather Peter had come from Belfast runnin’ from the Brits and so she was here, amid the birds and trees and berries and fruit and laughter and she still hated the Brits and their thieving ways and Gregory was her second to oldest child, second to oldest son. And he’d gone wrong.

Bernice would sit in her room in the trailer, which smelled of cream and velimints, and watch her own television, as she didn’t like baseball nor my father none whatsoever mind you, though once in a blue moon if she had a taste from the wine, which jesus said was okay once in awhile, after all, she’d admit in low breathes that my dad was okay, though he worked too much at the machine shop and watched too many ball games on the TV. And Bernice liked her Lawrence Welk, and PBS, and things of culture that only she might appreciate and she was gray and white and fat and strong, with big glasses and hearing aids and a social security check that came every month like clockwork. And so, every Wednesday Gregory with the big black hat would come, and he’d had some problems.

He didn’t wear his black hat on those days, and he came in bent and tired, and he had a job too, a good one, during the week at a factory, but the kids ate a lot, and his wife had a good job too, but there were bills to pay, and maybe could his momma, Bernice spare twenty dollars from her purse for the week? To get some bread for the grandchildren? And he bowed and muttered and Bernice just found an extra twenty and nodded and he was leaving her room as quickly as he came.

And he’d always stop, this god of the bars and the legend of the hills, on his way out the smacked up screen door, and my momma in the kitchen and my daddy in the chair, and look at me and nod and smile and whiskey hiss on his deep voice. And his eyes would twinkle in recognition as he nodded to me, and then I’d be scared, like I did something very wrong and everyone knew it but still he was a god and he was speaking and so I sat dumb and no one else seemed to pay any attention at all.

“You’re smart,” He’d slur, “Keep gettin’ them good grades and go to college. You’re a good kid.”

And he’d be gone, and I’d be alone still and even more confused and no one ever said anything about it, ever. And the silence sweltered in, like some soggy blanket of reproach for the sentence just imposed on me, and I’d seek refuge away from the ball games and lawerence welk, amid the trees and bushes. Biding my time, till the black hat might come to me, along with the weekly visits homeward, for twenty dollars a pop. Fini