Whence Uncle Travis?

I don't know what drew me into the attic of the family's old Victorian house in North Main Street in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, on a Saturday morning. I think it was because I thought there were things in the house that were missing since I'd returned from two years at the Lakeland Behavioral Health System residential facility in Springfield. There were still large areas of missing memory in my mind since the auto accident nearly four years previously that I and the doctors were trying to get back. I'd been released, at twenty-two, to come home and enroll in the two-year Three Rivers College, to start getting my life together, with the doctors saying that if anyone was going to help me get those chunks of memory back, it would be my family. But my mother and father didn't seem a bit interested in me getting those memories back. And when I returned home, something seemed out of kilter with the house itself--things being missing or not where they had been during my life before the accident.

I had agreed with the doctors at Lakeland that I should just move on now, with starting a life, working from the main talent I seemed to have--fine arts. But it still bugged the hell out of me that I couldn't remember certain areas, certain vital aspects of me. Like, I could come right out and say it, my sexual preferences. I didn't know which way I wanted to swing. I was twenty-two, for god sake, and though I'd almost blanked out of couple of strategic years of my life, or big aspects of those, it was past time for me to know whether I liked women or men. I could contemplate having sex with women, but often when I did--and I'd had sex with women while in Springfield, more often than not, the images of having sex with men drifted into my consciousness. I hadn't actually had sex with men--or I didn't think I'd had. That last, not being sure I hadn't had, kept rising up and biting me in the butt.

It wasn't just some misplaced "things" that had sent me into the attic. I knew, at the back of my mind, that there had been a box I kept in my bedroom closet that had dirty books and sex magazines in it. Didn't all guys have that? What I needed to know about my preferences, I was sure I could find from what was in that box. But there wasn't any such box in my bedroom closet now--and I hadn't been able to find one in the attic either. So, it was just "things" that were missing. It was clues to what I needed to know.

There were fleeting moments of past, of possibilities. Of being with someone. I could almost conjure him up in my mind and then he'd float away. Sometime between the horrendous automobile accident--or during it. Hell, I couldn't get hold of it.

So, I was here, in the attic, going through boxes, not having been helped a bit by either of my parents and not finding that one box I was looking for. I'd noticed that stuff I remembered being in the living room--framed photos mostly--were missing and I asked about that. My father, Frank, just said, "I haven't noticed. Ask your mother. She's always redecorating." But that wasn't true. I hadn't forgotten everything. It was just the more stressful things I'd forgotten, the doctors thought.

"I just got tired of the clutter," she said. "I boxed them up. They're around somewhere," she said. She didn't say they were in the attic. She seemed determine not to say where the stuff was and she probably didn't notice how important it was to me at the moment. I didn't have the nerve to ask her about the one box from my closet, but now, when I was going through other boxes in the attic, my interest had drifted to other things I found there that once were downstairs. I didn't even know why that was important to me, but it was. There was something about the photographs that had been in the living room that was important to me. I needed to pursue the issue. She said they were boxed up and put away, but she didn't say where. That would only mean some closets in the spare rooms--it was a big house--the basement or the attic.

It was the attic. I found the box, and I found the photos. And just before I found them and pulled them out of the box, a name came into my mind: Travis. Uncle Travis. And also, at the same time, the name became connected with that something, something taboo, in my background that my mind was refusing to acknowledge.

Did I have an uncle named Travis? Did he do something that made me unsure of my sexuality--or that clarified that for me?

* * * *

"Yes, that's Travis. Where did you find those, Marty?"

"In a box in the attic," I answered my father. They weren't in the box I was looking for, but they at least gave me something to pursue to start unraveling all of these questions in my mind about "before the accident."

He'd hardly taken his eyes away from the TV set, where the Los Angeles Rams professional football team, which Frank Blandford had been diehard enough to follow when they abandoned Saint Louis and moved west, were playing. "Those" was referring to the two framed photographs I'd brought down from the attic, two that I had remembered seeing on the piano in the living room for years.

I remembered enough about Uncle Travis to know he wasn't that much older than I was--not more than ten years--but that he was a lot younger than either of my parents. I had no idea how he was an uncle of mine. One of the photos was of him as a boy of about twelve--I don't know how I knew it was him, but I did--standing with my parents and an older man. A toddler was in my mother's arms. I assumed that was me. The other photo was of Travis in his Navy uniform, and again I don't know why I knew it was him, I just did. He was maybe nineteen or twenty and he was one fine-looking dude. The term "sexy" came to my mind unbidden, and, yes, it disturbed me that it had.

Something about Travis. There was something about Travis that no one seemed to want me to recover in my memory. What had Travis done with--or to me? I somehow knew there was something considered unmentionable.

"What's happened to Uncle Travis?" I asked. "Why have his photos been put away?"

"What are you thinking about Travis?" my dad said. His eyes went back to the TV and I could see that he tensed up. "Are you remembering something that had been lost?"

He said that almost in a dreading tone. What was up with that? I wondered. This was why they finished with me at Lakeland. It had been too long working with the doctors there and I'd reached an impasse with my memory. They'd said the best chance of unlocking my mind was to return home--to Polar Bluff--and get back into what was intended to be the progression of my life: going to junior college in art before leaving home and going further afield. My mom had agreed with that. For some reason my dad hadn't. For some reason it was almost like my dad didn't want me to remember. What did he know that he wanted me to forget? Did it have something to do with Uncle Travis?

"I'm not remembering much. But I remembered that his photos had been on the piano in the living room and they're now in the attic. I can almost remember something... something about him."

"There isn't much use of that anymore," Dad said, still staring into the TV although they had gone to commercials. "He's dead. There's nothing more to know there." The last came out almost like an afterthought.

"Dead? How did he die? When?" I blurted out.

"Ask your mother, if you must. He's from her side. But it's best just to drop it." I was halfway toward the door to the corridor leading to the kitchen where I could hear my mother humming when he added, "And he's not really your uncle. He's not related to any of us, thank god."

Now, what the hell did that mean? Why was this a sore point with Dad? It proved to be a sore point with Mom, too, though.

"Travis is best forgotten, Martin," she said, turning her head to look out of the window over the kitchen sink. She was not any more anxious to do a face-to-face with me on the subject of Travis Trent than my father had been.

Travis Trent--another tidbit of information coming out of the fog to me. His last name was Trent--he didn't share our last name of Blandford. But then, Dad had said he was from Mother's side. She wasn't a Trent either. Playing detective like this wasn't a bit of fun.

"And what made you think of him?"

"Dad told me just now he was from your side of the family. Your brother, I guess, if he's my uncle. But Dad also said he wasn't related to us."

"Well, he isn't," she answered, deciding that the kitchen table needed to be wiped off vigorously with a wet cloth, which, again, required that she be looking away from me. "My dad married again after your grandmother died. His new wife was a Trent, widowed, with a boy. So, Travis technically isn't in our family."

But he had been raised in the family for some years. I knew that, although, again, I had no idea how I knew that. I seemed to be open doors into my brain, a crack at a time. Was this the way the Lakeland doctors thought my memories would come back to me after that automobile accident?

It didn't escape me that Mom was referring to Travis in the present tense, not the past. Was that from some sort of sloppiness or didn't she consider Travis to be as dead as Dad said he was. I could see Mom was trembling, though, and I didn't want to make her stroke out, so...

She closed this out for now herself. "The trashmen come tomorrow," she said. "Could you go around and collect it and get the bin down on the street. Your father is so engrossed in that football game that I'm afraid he'll forget to do it. And then, you're looking a little feverish. Maybe you should lie down for a while--not work on this memory thing as hard as you're doing. Supper will be a little late."

She was closing down on this Uncle Travis thing as quickly and as hard as Dad had done. And maybe I was pushing too hard and fast on this.

There just was something about Uncle Travis. And it was related, I somehow knew, to my problem of having images of men come up when I was with a woman. I wasn't clear on my preferences. And for some reason I was connecting Uncle Travis with all of that. I stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked at the photos again. Yes, indeed, he was one handsome, sexy dude in the Navy uniform. As I mounted the stairs, I tried to put that out of my mind. But that was the basic problem. Since the auto accident there was entirely too much missing from my mind.

Whence Uncle Travis? Living or dead? Did something happen in the Navy? Did something happen between Travis and me? Why was I obsessing over this?

* * * *

"Do you really not remember the automobile accident?"

"Just snatches of what happened while it was happening and afterward--nothing before. It's like a section of my life got wiped out and my memory didn't start again until I was in the hospital, pretty banged up."

"Were you alone in the car? You said something about being ejected from the passenger seat. That would mean there was someone else. Who was it? You weren't driving?"

"Did I say I was ejected from the passenger seat?" I asked. "I don't remember whether that was true." But, in fact, I now accepted it as true. This was how bits and pieces of my memory were coming back to me. I'd been told I had been in the passenger seat. That must be in the accident report somewhere--wherever a copy of that was now. As Travis's visage floated by in my consciousness. Was I in the car with Travis? Was Dad right? Had Travis died in the crash? Was he the one who was driving? Where could I find a copy of the accident report? Why hadn't I looked for it before now? But maybe I had, and that was a memory I'd decided to bury.

I was at the library checkout desk in the Poplar Bluff public library on North Main Street, within walking distance of my parents' house--well, still my house, as well. I'd been in the town for several months now and was settling in, studying art at Three Rivers College and working part time as an UPS driver, and I'd even acquired a girlfriend, Jennifer, one of the librarians here. I'd known Jennifer in high school. We'd dated a bit then. We dated even more now. We'd slept together, which she seemed quite satisfied with and I thought went pretty well, although I didn't find it fully satisfying. But only now was she getting around to asking me for details on the automobile accident and the resultant loss of memory. I couldn't help her all that much about either, and my attention was somewhat distracted now.

Jennifer noticed my divided attention. "What have you been staring at?" she asked. "Oh, I see. That's Josh over there. You must be taken with the resemblance." She motioned for the young man, about my age, to come over. He had been sitting at a library table, talking to another young black man. They'd had their heads together, but I supposed that might have only because we were in a library and they were trying to be quiet. Both of them where strikingly handsome young men, well-dressed, and obviously taking very good care of themselves. They also were touching each other with their hands as they talked, which I had always associated with being Italian--or with something else. They both were a light chocolate brown, so I didn't think they were Italian.

I also don't think I had been watching one of them closely because of the resemblance between him and Jennifer. Jennifer was mixed race, her mother white and her father black, but it's not something you'd know from looking at her. You'd probably guess she was from somewhere in the Mediterranean. I could see now, though, that she'd pointed it out, that there was a resemblance between the two.

The young man who Jennifer had called Josh saw her gesture, spoke briefly to the other young man, and then rose and came over to the desk.

"This is my brother, Josh," Jennifer said. "He's an ICU nurse over at the Pershing VA Medical Center. This is Marty Blandford, who I'd known in high school, Josh. I've told you about him."

"You most certainly did," Josh said, giving me a dazzling smile. He was a hunk, square-jawed and handsome as the devil. He looked more like one of those doctors on a TV soap opera than a nurse, but if I needed nursing he'd certainly do. His handshake was firm. He looked directly into my eyes and I was afraid he could discern what I was thinking. I'm sure I blushed. The blush came from my growing awareness that I might like men more than I did women.

Jennifer hadn't told me anything about her brother, Josh, though. And she didn't now. We engaged in a bit of whispered discussion, enough for Josh to know that Jennifer and were dating, but not enough--at least from this conversation--for him to know we were fucking, and then he was off, saying he had to get back to work. Apparently, the other young man was a nurse at the VA hospital too, as they left together. I wondered what else they did together. I admonished myself in my thoughts for visioning what I might like to do with either or both of them.

The reaction I'd had to Josh was similar to what I occasionally had to other men as well--enough that it kept me off balance and confused, and enough that it made me try all the much more with Jennifer in bed to convince myself that's what I preferred. Another man had affected me in that way in these last five months. That was my art instructor, Slava Zoukoff, at Three Rivers College. He was maybe in his early forties, but he was a man who touched you when he talked to you too, who gave you--me, at least--meaningful looks and extra attention in class, and who was handsome and quite fit for his age. I did think of him inappropriately from time to time. He had an unusual past--an Australian whose family was White Russian, royalists, who escaped the Russian revolution and then the Red Guards revolution in China before arriving in Missouri by way of Australia. And there was Uncle Travis, too. I still thought of him, the image of him in his Navy uniform floating up into my consciousness now and again. But I still haven't unlocked the mystery of Travis and what he'd done--or what we'd done together.

The encounter with Jennifer's brother had left me keyed up. She and I went to dinner at Tio's Bar and Grill over near the college and then to a movie that Jennifer enjoyed and I found frustrating, as it cut off right as the actors were getting into the sack. I was in the mood for sex--seeing it and doing it. Then we went back to her apartment in the basement of an old house on Hickory Street, where, I'm happy to say, we didn't cut off right before we got into the sack.

I'd been aching for it since I'd picked her up at the library, so it was a good session for us. We did it raunchier than we had done before, going into the sixty-nine position, with me eating her out while she sucked me off and then me on my back with her riding me in a cowboy until I needed to have full control, when I rolled over on top of her, coaxed her legs open, mounted and penetrated, and gave her a deep missionary.

I spent the night and we did it again. I didn't worry about my parents and what they'd think. I was twenty-two. When they'd heard I was going with Jennifer, who they'd known from my high school days and that my father had long ago stopped referring to as the half-breed, they accepted it with suspiciously obvious relief--like maybe they were relieved that I was "about time" with a woman. It was a little surprising not to hear a peep out my dad about her mixed race since I'd returned home. He'd certainly had a lot to say about that when I was sweet on her in high school.

While they weren't showing any reluctance to me being out all night with a woman with her own apartment, I must say I was having a little trouble in spending the night with Jennifer. The sex was good. I don't want to leave the impression that it wasn't, but it was like more than just Jennifer and I were having it. While we fucked, my muddled mind kept surfacing other images--disturbing images for the circumstance. The faces and fleeting view of much more of them of her brother, Josh, Uncle Travis, and even my art instructor, Slava Zoukoff, kept rising up, swirling around, and then fading into the great face and body of the woman I was fucking.

* * * *

Imagine my surprise when I walked into a studio art painting session at the college to find that the nude model stretched out on the dais was no other than the instructor himself, Slava Zoukoff. He was a strikingly handsome and fit man for his age--well, for any age--and he didn't seem the least embarrassed to be posing in near nude, with just a skimpy loincloth around his hips. There was, of course, no reason for him to be embarrassed with how he looked--just that it seemed to be lacking in dignity for the instructor himself to be modeling.

He had been floating around me suggestively for the entire term, paying extra attention and encouragement to me and being very touchy-feely. He spoke with a Slavic accent and didn't, it seemed, to have full control of English. Thus, I couldn't be sure that some of the comments he made to me throughout the course were just not carefully and knowingly chosen rather than sexually suggestive.

Whatever the case, he hadn't been helping me at all in my confusion over what my sexual preferences were and why, and if they went to men, when did this start and what part in that had Uncle Travis had?

My hands were trembling as I was painting. Zoukoff's attentions to me hadn't gone unaffecting--or unappreciated--I can't claim. I decided I had to do something in the abstract rather than detailed realistic rendering. Still, as we were finishing up and the art instructor had come off the dais and was walking around, just in his loincloth, and inspecting what we'd done and how well he thought we'd done it, he lingered behind me, touching me with his long, sensitive fingers, his chin nearly on my shoulder as he looked at what I'd painted--and he praised my work.