He was telling all of them how he was getting rid of the bags under his eyes. He was going to take up tennis. He had bought a Jaguar sedan, hunter green. Now on the beach as he sat with the other uncles and my father, watching us kids swim, he seemed all prepared for a breakout into a new world, even if he couldn’t swim, even in his pale country skin. Here he was in wild denial of his fear of the water. His wife, my aunt, seemed happier sitting there beside him. She’d been kinder lately, and I forgave her much. Maybe they had settled something at home.
I’ll remember him there before the next moment, loved and honored and looking ahead to a breakout, on that little beach. He could be taken for a real man of the world, interested even in puppets, even in fine fabrics. You could see him — couldn’t you? — reaching out to pet the world. Too long had he denied his force to the cosmos at large. Have me, have me, kindred, he might be calling. May my story be of use. I am meeting the ocean on its own terms. I am ready.
The New Orleans children were a foulmouthed group in general out there in the brown water of the bay. Their parents brought them over to vacation and many of the homes on the beach were owned by New Orleans natives. The kids were precocious and street-mouthed, sounding like Brooklynites really, right out of a juvenile delinquent movie. They had utter contempt for the local Crackers. The girls used rubes like me and my cousins to sharpen up their tongues. And they could astound and wither you if you let them get to you. They had that mist of Catholic voodoo around them too.
Some sunbrowned girl, maybe twelve, in a two-piece swimsuit, got nudged around while we were playing and started screaming at me.
“Hey Cracker, eat me!”
“What?”
“Knockin’ me with ya foot! Climb on this!” She gave me the finger.
You see? Already deep into sin, weathered like a slut at a bingo table, from a neighborhood that smelled like whiskey on a hot bus exhaust. I guess Uncle Peter saw the distress in my face, although I was probably a year older than the girl. He had heard her too. He began raving at her across the sand and water, waving both arms. He was beside himself, shouting at her to “Never say those things! Never ever say those things to him!”
I looked at her, and here was another complicating thing. She had breasts and a cross dangling by a chain between them and was good-looking. Uncle Peter had come up to the waterline and was looking at her too, forcing his hooked finger down for emphasis, “Don’t ever!” But she leaned back to mock this old man, and she confused him and broke his effect.
Another uncle called out for him to come back, I was old enough to take care of myself, there wasn’t any real problem here. But Uncle Peter hurled around and said: “There is a problem. There is.”
Then he left the beach by himself and we didn’t see him the rest of the reunion. I saw my aunt sitting in their bedroom with her shoulders to me, her head forward, alone, and I understood there was huge tragedy in my uncle, regardless of anything she ever did.
A couple of the brothers went out on his trail. They said he began in a saloon near the seawall in Waveland.
Could it be as simple as that my uncle saw, in his nervous rage and unnatural mood, that girl calling me down the road to sin, and he exploded? That he saw my fate coming to me in my teens, as his had, when he killed the man? Or was he needing a drink so badly that none of this mattered? I don’t know. After that bender he didn’t much follow up on any great concern for me. Maybe he gave up on himself.
It took seven years more. My father came and got me at my apartment in the college town and told me about his death, in a hospital over in that county. My father had white hair by then, and I remember watching his head bowed over, his arm over the shoulders of his own, their mother, my grandmother, with her own white-haired head bowed in grief no mother should bear. My grandmother repeated over and over the true fact that Peter was always “doing things, always his projects, always moving places.” His hands were busy, his feet were swift, his wife was bountifully well off, forever.
A man back in the ’20s came to town and started a poker game. Men gathered and drank. Peter lost his money and started a fight. The man took a chair and repeatedly ground it into his face while Peter was on the floor. Peter went out into the town, found a pistol, came back, and shot the man. The brothers went about influencing the jury, noting that the victim was trash, an out-of-towner. The judge agreed. The victim was sentenced to remain dead. Peter was let go.
I’ve talked to my nephew about this. For years now I have dreamed I killed somebody. The body has been hidden, but certain people know I am guilty, and they show up and I know, deep within, what they are wanting, what this is all about. My nephew was nodding the whole while I was telling him this. He has dreamed this very thing, for years.