The Dangerous Uncle

James D. Houston

"If you would be unloved and forgotten,
be reasonable."
from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"I remember a day we were down along the creek," he told me once, "and back in that part of Texas the creek was the only place where you could cool off in the summer. I guess I was around twelve and Andy was around fourteen. He had this trick he liked to do, just to show off. He used to do it at school until the teachers made him quit. He was always real limber, you see. He had a way of putting one foot up behind his head, like a Hindu, and he was mighty proud of himself whenever he got his foot up there, since he was the only one in our family who could do that.

"Well sir, on this particular day, just about the time we had our shirts pulled off, but still had our trousers on, a couple of girls came walking along the creek trail. Anderson decided he would show them something they would never forget, and he commenced to shove his whole foot and ankle up behind his head. The girls saw that and they got to giggling and ran on down the creek. Anderson got to laughing so hard he fell over. He'd been standing on one leg, ya see, like a stork. For a while he was laying there in the dirt by the creek laughing til the tears ran down his face. Then he quit laughing and looked up at me with this funny look, and he said, Hey Dudley, come over here and give me a hand, will ya, while I get my foot down.

"I went over there and pushed and pulled a while, with him telling me what to do and where to grab hold. But it turned out there wasn't much either one of us could do because his foot was just plain stuck. He had shoved it over too far and got his neck turned some kind of way, and I had to leave him there and run back home to get my dad and our oldest brother, who was already grown, and stronger than anybody else too, because he did pushups and lifted weights, and bring them down there. It was a mile to the house and a mile back. Before we got near where he was we could hear Anderson yelling. His leg had cramped up. He thought he was going to die alone by the creek bank with one foot locked behind his head."

The way dad told it, that was the prelude to Anderson's entire career - the family clown and a born nuisance, always leaving a mess behind that someone else had to come along and clean up. It was also the longest story I can remember hearing him tell. He was not a talkative man, yet he would talk about Anderson. I think he had to, there was so much to get off his chest. Anderson called things out of him no one else could call out. My dad was not given to shows of anger. Yet this brother could make him curse and slam a fist into the side of the house. He was not a violent man, but one day Anderson madehim angry enough to kill.

This happened after we moved south into Santa Clara Valley, where dad had picked up a few acres with a house and outbuildings. During our years in San Francisco, one of his dreams had been to get out of the city and back to the land. The valley had not yet begun to bulge and multiply and become the high-tech headquarters it is today. It was still one huge orchard. Out near the western foothills we had a small piece of it, with some fruit trees, a barn, a greenhouse.

Not long after we made this move, Anderson started showing up three or four times a year. He liked it there, since he shared dad's taste for the rural life. They shared a few other things too, but in certain crucial ways these two brothers were like day and night. Dad was a quiet and inward man. Anderson was a compulsive talker. Dad was anchored. Anderson was not. He had gone through five wives and countless jobs, and now he was drifting back and forth between Texas and California. Dad would allow him to stay, sometimes for months, because they had grown up together, and because he was the brother with nowhere else to go, and because Anderson would talk him into it, and because Anderson, when sober, was a man of many talents. Perhaps too many.

He was a carpenter. He was a gardener. He was a mechanic. He could sink postholes and erect a fence that ran straight and true. One summer I watched him take over a picking crew, become foreman for a rancher we knew, and get twenty acres of apricots gathered in record time. For a number of years before the war, Anderson made a good living as a hairdresser in Los Angeles. He changed his name to Andre, and he took advantage of the fact that in their boyhood section of Texas the nearest town of any size had been Paris. He became "An-dray from Par-ee." With his wavy hair and his rascal's grin and his gift of gab, it worked. He made and spent a lot of money.

When World War Two came along he joined the army and travelled the Pacific with a construction battalion, Hawaii, New Guinea, the Aleutians. The heavy drinking started then and led to a stomach ulcer that finally put him in an army hospital. No one could say it was the army or the war that disabled him, but he left the service with a disability pension and a chronic condition that had him moving in and out of V.A. hospitals for years. Mostly out. he wouldn't sit still for treatment. He would check himself in on a Monday. By Tuesday night be would be sneaking out the side door, carrying his shoes.

If medicine was prescribed, he wouldn't take it. If advice was given - such as Stop drinking - he would listen a while, then forget. Twice he joined A.A., and twice he backslid. By the time we were installed in Santa Clara Valley he was living on his pension checks, which he tended to blow as soon as one arrived in the mail. His monthly binge could end with a phone call from an all-night service station in Reno, someone saying, "Mr. Houston? We got a fella here out of gas and out of money sittin in a vegetable truck that isn't his and he can't remember where he got it, who says you're his brother and not to call the police til we call you first..."

Dad would slam the phone down and say that as of today Andy would have to take care of himself because this was absolutely the last time he was going to bail him out of anything!

The next day they would both appear in the driveway side by side in our pickup, my dad stoic, the survivor who had come west during the 1930s with seven dollars in his pocket and now had seven acres with a house in the country, and Anderson, disheveled, hangdog, the prodigal brother with nowhere to lay his head.

We would soon learn he had promised dad something. We would usually learn it from Anderson himself, as we sat around the supper table. And I should point out that in those days I did not yet know the broken pattern of his life. I only heard his Southern Comfort voice, saw the crafty eyes of the garrulous uncle, the colorful uncle, the uncle you hoped would stay for a while.

"Some people are slow learners," he would say, as he dove into his first solid meal in a week, talking between mouthfuls of biscuits and gravy, pork chops, blackeyed peas. "And you people are looking at the slowest learner of all time. But I'll tell you right now, ol Andy has learned his lesson at last. I have taken my final drink. I swear it. Dudley here is my witness. You are all my witnesses. If it wasn't for Dudley, I would be a goner. I would be breathing my final breath in the darkest gutter of the skid rows of Los Angeles, and nobody knows that better that I do. I tell ya..."

Now tears would be glinting in his red-rimmed eyes, as he paid tribute to all the many ways my father had saved him from himself. "I tell ya, I am going to make it up to you, Dudley. I am going to make it up starting tomorrow. Starting tonight! We've got a couple of hours of daylight left. Soon as we finish supper I am going to go out there and get started on that chicken house roof. Yes sir. I am gonna get a new roof on your chicken house, so them white leghorns will sleep cozy. Then I'm gonna run that fence down along to the end of the property line like I started to do last spring. And listen. Let me tell all of you right now, help me stay away from the mailbox. I mean it! I don't want to see that pension check. I don't even want to see a calendar. That way I'll lose track of time and won't know which day of the month it is and won't even know when to look for that check, because that check belongs to Dudley! You all hear me now? You are talking to a man who is making a fresh start!"

I should also point out that dad's vision of how things could look around the place ran far ahead of his available time. There was always brush to be cleared or the barn to be patched, a chimney to rebuild, a bedroon to add on, an acre of trees to prune. He was working fulltime as a painting contractor, and the weekends were never long enough. My mother meanwhile had her hands full managing the house, tending her flowers outside the house, keeping me and my sister in school clothes, and giving any spare hours to the vegetables. In this little world Anderson's skills were much appreciated, particularly when it came to the chickens, which played a key role in my father's dream. A well managed chicken pen would provide the eggs and the meat to complement the tomatoes and the corn and the greens that would emerge from the year-round garden. Building up his flock little by little, he had accumulated thirty white leghorns and a few Rhode Island Reds. He had recently widened the pen with new fencing. Anderson must have known, consciously or unconsciously, that the henhouse roof was right at the top of dad's long list of chores, and the very offer that would soften his heart.

So once again he stayed, and two months went by without incident. Fresh loam soon darkened all the flower beds. New gravel appeared in the driveway. Borders of brick and river-stones had encircled the fruit trees nearest the house. At night, around the table we would listen to him talk, and this in itself was worth a lot. Dad never talked much at the table. He ate in silence, thinking about what had to be done tomorrow.

Two months like this, then one night the supper table was quiet again. My father, home late and coming in from the garage just as the food was set out, looked around the kitchen and said, "Andy lost his appetite?"

My mother said, "I thought maybe he was with you today."

"Why would he be with me?"

"I sure haven't seen him around here."

He thought about this and started to eat. After a while he said, "What day is it?"

"Thursday."

"What day of the month?"

"The second."

He thought again and ate some more. "I suppose if you brought in the mail yesterday there is no way he could have got his hands on that pension check."

"I thought you brought the mail in yesterday," my mother said.

"How could I bring in the mail when I wasn't here."

"I told you I had to go shopping."

"You don't have to go shopping right when the mailman is coming up the road."

"I can't spend my whole life walking back and forth to the mailbox, Dudley."

This came out sharp. When he didn't respond, she softened. "One time that check didn't get here until the third or the fourth. The way he keeps changing addresses, it's a wonder it ever gets here at all."

"He wouldn't take off by himself if he didn't have any money."

"Did you look in your clothes closet?"

"I'd better do that," he said, pushing his chair back.

If anything was missing, a jacket, or one of dad's favorite shirts, it meant Anderson was gone and did not plan to return for quite some time. But nothing was missing, which meant the phone could ring at any moment. Dad sat down at the table again and pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes and looked out into the dusk, waiting for that call, already bracing for it.

For three days he waited, then he began to worry that something might have happened, something worse than drunkeness. On the night of the third day he drove around to the nearest saloons. No one had seen Andy.

The next afternoon I was out in front of the house trying to straighten the handlebars on my one-speed when he reappeared, carrying what looked like a square cage. He wasn't staggering. He was very erect, walking with his shoulders back, planting his feet like a mountaineer starting a long climb, though there was no mountain. The road was flat.

He called out, "Jimmy! How you doin, son?"

"I'm doin fine, Uncle Anderson. How you doin?"

"I got somethin for ya," he said.

As he approached, I looked again at the cage, trying to see through its close wire mesh. There was something alive inside, eager to get out. But that was not what he meant. From his scuffed-up leather jacket he withdrew a photograph and handed it to me with a wink. It was a folded and rumpled but still glossy eight-by-ten of a young woman in a skimpy white swimsuit, early Jayne Mansfield perhaps, or someone of her proportions. I don't have a clear memory of her face. I was fourteen, and I was transfixed by the cleavage. I glanced at Anderson and saw him watching my hunger, the depraved uncle, the outlaw uncle, the uncle you wished would take you somewhere.

He winked again. "I got somethin for your daddy too," he said, lifting the lid of the cage an inch to reveal a beak, a glittering eye. Half a head forced its way out, black and fierce. Anderson pushed the lid shut.

Your daddy is big on hens, but he is short on roosters. This is a little rooster I picked up over in San Jose. Fella I ran into raises em to fight. So they got plenty of spunk. This little black one here is the spunkiest chicken I have ever seen. It is just what your daddy needs to pep up his flock. You know what I mean? Cross breeding is what I'm talking about. Hybrid vigor."

Though I knew next to nothing about raising chickens, even less about fighting cocks, I knew this sounded like a dangerous idea. I also knew better than to stand in his way. There was whiskey on his breath, and smoke in his clothes, and in his eyes a glint just like that rooster's, somewhere between mischief and madness. Once before, when he was this far along, he had challenged me to a fight. With clenched fists swirling he had demanded that I punch him as hard as I could, to try for the face. If I was afraid to punch my own uncle in the face, he had cried, I was a yellow bellied coward and no nephew of his. Today he was on a kind of automatic pilot, he was walking and he was talking, but he was hearing no one, seeing nothing but some crazed vision of how this bird was going to transform his brother's flock - which of course it did.

Holding to his own straight and narrow course he moved past the house, past the barn, around a corner of the pen. Once inside the gate, he set the cage down on its side and unlatched the lid.

The cock rushed out, with an impatient lift of sleek black wings, so black, in late sun, the close-trimmed feathers had a purple tinge. As if surprised to find no adversary there, it stopped in the middle of the yard, muscular and nervous, its head twitching, its tense legs ready to spring.

Anderson had probably picked up that bird right after a fight. Spurs were still tied to its heels, little knives that looked dark with what might have been blood, though I wasn't sure. He only stood still a few seconds. These cocks that have been trained to kill, they must feed on fear. It must bring out the worst in them. The leghorns had scurried for the fence, clucking and bunching. This black rooster went for the other males first, then started after the hens, ripping and slashing, jabbing at eyes, sometimes lifting off the ground to drive spurs into a defenseless breast or wing or rump.

I remember Anderson poised in the half-open gateway, for a long moment of stupefied horror, while a few birds made their escape between his legs. He began to kick at them, warning, "Look out now! Look out!" Then he was a barnyard dancer, waving his arms at the flurry, shouting, "Hyeah! Hyeah!" Wary of the rapier beak, he made some half-hearted lunges. Finally he yelled at me to go inside and get my .22.

Loading it took a while. The rifle stood behind my desk. The shells were in another room, one dad kept locked. By the time I came bounding through the back door, his pickup had pulled into the driveway. I watched him climb out and walk to the fence and gaze at what he knew was his brother's handiwork. Some birds had fluttered out the gate or into the safety of the henhouse. At least half were dead or badly wounded, flopping around with broken wings, broken backs, fluid running from a torn eye. It was a battlefield of feathers and carcasses, with one bird still on two feet, the spent but victorious killer cock, his black coat gleaming with blood.

For a silent minute dad surveyed this carnage. His teeth pressed together until the jaw muscles stood out like flat rocks inside his cheeks. Then he turned toward Anderson, sitting on the woodpile about twenty feet away with his face in his hands. Dad walked over to the chopping block, freed the hand axe and stood there while Anderson raised his head. Seeing the axe, he swallowed what he probably figured was going to be his final swallow.

Dad turned away and walked to the chicken pen and kicked open the gate and kicked leghorn carcasses out of the way. When he had the battle-weary rooster cornered, he grabbed it behind the neck in a grip so sudden and tight, the bird looked paralyzed. Squeezing it at arms length, he brought it back to the block. This seemed to revive the bird, whose sqirming life-fear, in turn, revived Anderson. Cold sober now, his face filled with pleading, he looked up and said, "Don't do it, Dudley."

The hand axe rose, and Anderson said it again. "Please don't do it. That rooster cost me fifty dollars."

"FIFTY DOLLARS!" my father shouted. "That's damn near half your pension check!" "That's what I'm trying to tell you."

The axe fell with such force, the blade sank two inches into the wood, while the black head went one way, and the rest of the bird went the other. They watched it run in circles, with blood spurting from the open neck, until the life was spent and it fell over into the dirt.

Quietly my father said, "I want you to go get that bird and pluck it." Tears were streaming down Anderson's face, tears of relief that he himself was still alive. He said, "Pluck it?"

"I want you to pull out every last feather, and that includes the real small ones underneath the wings and inside the legs."

"What for?"

"We're gonna eat that bird for dinner tonight. If it cost fifty dollars, we might as well get some use out of it."

"I tried to bargain that fella down, Dudley. I swear I did. But he just wouldn't listen. Fifty was his bottom offer."

Disgusted, my father stepped back into the pen, where he began to clean up the mess, salvage what he could. He sent me out to round up strays. Anderson went to work on the rooster. About an hour later he presented it to my mother, who had come home from an afternoon's shopping to find her dinner menu slightly revised. She had cooked a lot of chickens, but never a fighting cock. She decided to boil it, and she let it boil for a long time, hoping for some kind of stew.

Late that night, when we sat down to supper, we discovered that boiling only made it tougher. In death as in life that bird was solid muscle. Though narrow strips of flesh could eventually be torn from the bone, they were unchewable. Several minutes of silent struggle passed before anyone dared to mention this.

With a hopeful grin Anderson said, "It's not that bad."

"I suppose I could have tried roasting it," my mother said.

"It's not that bad at all," Anderson went on, "considering the life this bird has led."

He winked at me and then at my sister, and we would have laughed, were it not for the cloud hanging over the table, which was the great cloud of my father's disappointment in the brother who had gone too far. Anderson knew this, even as he tried one more time to get a rise out of him.

"Fact a the matter is, what we're lookin at here is a fifty dollar dinner. Now I know you aint never had a dinner that was that expensive, Dudley. I'd say we're eatin mighty high on the hog tonight!"

Dad nodded. "I guess you're right, Andy. We'd have to drive clear to San Francisco to get a dinner that cost this much."

Anderson's laugh burst out, raucous and full of phlegm. He pounded on the table. "You kids hear what your daddy just said? We'd have to drive clear to San Francisco!"

His laugh filled the kitchen and went on for a long time, but all it drew from dad was a thin smile, a painfully courteous smile for the brother who had finally pushed him past his limit.

Years later we would all be able to laugh about that day, dad too, the way he laughed about the time Andy's foot got stuck behind his neck. I see now that Anderson had always been the one to do this for him, in a way no one else could - rile him, stir him, tickle his funnybone. But this time forgiveness was still a long way off. And it turned out to be the last night Anderson sat at our table.

As time went by, news would trickle our way, from other relatives who had taken him in, or invented reasons not to. For a while, as I heard the stories others had to tell, I thought dad had been too gullible, the way he had let Andy talk him into things year after year, then steal his clothes and his time and his trust. It's clear to me now that dad loved him more and had put up with his antics longer than anyone else had been able to.

I don't know what passed between them, in private, before he left, but he was gone the next morning, heading back to Texas, the dark uncle, the dangerous uncle, the uncle you never forget.

© 1996, The Blue Penny Quarterly. All rights reserved.