Uncle TedI remember his Buick convertible,maroon and softly rounded, chrome polished down to the portholes, four big ones on each front fender, and even though I was only a kid, he’d park out by the street whenever he came to visit and let me pull it up in the drive near the door when he left. It was me in that leather front seat. It was me behind the wheel. Then he’d walk out the door with Aunt Rhonda, red-headed Rhonda in diamonds and mink, and he’d tip me a quarter. Rhonda was his third wife, as I recall. She smoked Kents and drank Manhattans. Ted drank CC on the rocks. He’d owned a railroad once. “Just a little one somewhere up north,” he’d say with a laugh. And sometimes when he and Dad would get to talking, say on Christmas Eve, I’d sit on the bottom stair in my pajamas till almost midnight hearing Ted tell about an eye for opportunity and the killer instinct, both of which you needed, he said to make it big. You could develop one, but the other you had to be born with, and Ted knew he had both. My father never said much, just filled the glasses. My mother emptied the ashtrays. Aunt Rhonda didn’t do much except smoke her Kents. Next morning I’d find the butts tossed out in the trash. Even they seemed somehow important, smudged with streaks of bright red lipstick, each one crushed out with the same downward twist. Bigshot-itis, my mother called it, and she hoped it wasn’t contagious and didn’t run in the family. To be honest, I still don’t know. It might have been someone else’s father, someone else’s Uncle Ted, but I know he blew his brains out with a shotgun one night when I was in college, all over the walls and furniture of his downtown apartment, and his brother, my dad or a friend’s dad, had to go clean it up. I imagine him there with his bucket and sponge and Mister Clean, as he studied the blood-soaked walls, the fleshy tufts of hair blown into the sofa, wondering where to begin and how much finally he would ever be able to wash away. |
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