HE STOOD ME UP.
“Where is he, Ma? He was supposed to be here. We were going to do something. We were going to do something yesterday and then he wasn’t up to it, then we were going to do something today and he just doesn’t show.”
Ma was trying hard to come up with something, but what did she know? She had no more control over this than I did, and I was making it harder by sitting in the front window staring out and pouting like a kid waiting for Saturday Dad when Saturday Dad wasn’t coming.
“Not that I care,” I said, completing the pathetic picture.
She came up behind me and started kneading my neck muscles like bread dough.
“You know how I feel about that neck rubbing,” I said sternly.
“I know,” she said. She continued rubbing, because we both knew how I felt about it.
“I realize it’s difficult, Elvin. You never asked for this.”
“I never asked for this,” I said.
“I try to talk to him, but it doesn’t change it. He has to keep himself to himself, for whatever reasons of his own. He wants to come close, but only so close. Like a wolf coming to the backyard.”
“Precisely,” I said. “And it was his idea. I never wanted to be bothered by any of this. It was his idea. And then he goes and stands me up.”
“He’s done worse things,” she said, digging her thumbs in a little deeper.
“Ow,” I said.
“Sorry.”
“I never asked for this, Ma.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“Not that I care.”
“Not that you do, no.” She gave my muscles a last firm squeeze, then clapped me on the shoulders and kissed me on the ear. She left then to go and make my supper, which she hadn’t expected to have to make.
And left me there sitting in the window like a dope. Like a five-year-old dope.
I wasn’t even thinking of him anymore. By the next day he had disappeared entirely from my consciousness, just as quickly as he had shown up.
I could do that. That was one of my best skills, so if I needed Alex Bishop to have never been there, then he never was.
So I was genuinely surprised when I walked through the door on Sunday after the movies and found my uncle’s bones spread across my sofa, and my dog licking his unconscious head.
“You’re late,” I said.
His eyes opened slowly. “I’m sorry.”
“Is that the best you can do?” I asked, and yes, I heard myself. I had gone from acting like his kid to acting like his spouse in forty-eight hours as my sense of identity was ripped to shreds.
“I wasn’t feeling well yesterday or the day before, Elvin. I am sorry. Can we forget it? You shouldn’t dwell on stuff, especially negative stuff. Do your best living in the now, and your later will be a little less messed up.”
He sat up, and looked like he regretted it.
“You don’t look too good still.”
“I always look like this when I wake up.”
“I saw you wake up on the couch once before and it didn’t look like this.”
“I haven’t felt the same since I winded myself on the tuba.”
“That’s a new one. I’ve had my playing turn other people green before, but never myself.”
“Well, I wasn’t trained in the instrument like you. It’ll pass. Where’s your mom?”
“She’s stealing some overtime.”
“I still got to talk to her about how easy it is to break in here. You guys should move someplace nicer.”
“Well, we’re comfortable, and the rent’s reasonable, and since you’re the only career criminal with any interest in the place... I think we’ll be okay.”
“Hmm. Well, we’ll see. Anyway, looks like it’s just the Bishop men then. Can I take you for an early supper?”
As days out go, I had to admit a restaurant sure sounded more tempting than a sweatbox.
“I suppose,” I said.
“This is my favorite restaurant,” Alex said.
“I never ate Thai food before. And how did a restaurant half a mile from my house get to be your favorite restaurant without my ever meeting you before?”
“Like I said, I’ve been hanging around.”
It seemed like a nice place to be hanging around if you were going to be hanging around. Lots of gold and green and leather in the walls, the ceilings, and the furniture. The smells were all warm, spices I didn’t know. Some music—one instrument, something between a mandolin and a harpsichord—played in the background so quietly it might have just been coming out of my own head. And best of all we were there in the between hours, well after lunch but before prime dinnertime, so we had the place to ourselves.
“I always come at this hour,” Alex said. “It is the only time for eating out.”
“I think there are other times,” I said. “But this is pretty great.”
“Did I ever tell you that it’s really your mother’s fault that I was in prison all that time?”
“No, actually, you didn’t.”
“Didn’t I? Well, here it goes....”
Just then the waiter arrived. Alex knew him, and vice versa.
“Hey Jerry,” he said.
“Hello, Mr. Bishop.”
He didn’t look like a Jerry to me, so maybe he was just humoring my uncle.
“Listen, Elvin, if you’re new at this, it’s smart to go with the tod mun and the pad thai. Can’t go wrong.”
“I’ll have the tod mun and the pad thai,” I said, having no interest in going wrong.
“The special pad thai,” Alex insisted. “And for me, I’ll just have the old standard. And Jerry, hit the spices. I mean, hit those spices. Hurt us, Jerry, is what I’m saying.”
“Pain it is,” Jerry said, scribbling. “And to drink?”
“We’ll have some tea please, and some orange juice. And a bottle of Tsingtao.”
“Mr. Bishop? I thought you weren’t drinking beer?”
“Oh, that’s not for me. It’s for my nephew here.”
“He is old enough?”
“Oh yes. Of course.”
Jerry cocked an eyebrow at me, scribbled some more, then left us.
“So I was fourteen at the beginning of the week. I was sixteen at the gym. And now I’m legal drinking age. I’m aging at a frightening pace.”
“Join the club, pal,” he said seriously.
“I never liked clubs very much. My mother did not put you in jail.”
“Okay, not exactly. But she should have. And the fact that she didn’t has caused me endless trouble. See, when I stole all that money off you and your mom—remember we told you about that?”
“Oh, let me think... stole money, stole money...”
“Ya. Well your mother, being too damn good. Being too damn good for her own damn good, refused to pursue the thing and put me in the can where I frankly belonged. So I said to myself, after about half a second of some very unproductive soul-searching, I said, hey, that didn’t hurt so much. Matter of fact, that didn’t hurt one little bit. So I went out and scammed somebody else. And that didn’t hurt either, ’cause I didn’t even get caught. Then, being pretty good with figures and bad with conscience, I built up a nice little hobby, thank you very much, of jerking people’s money off them without them even noticing.”
Jerry came and set the drinks down.
“Until somebody noticed,” I said.
“Until somebody noticed,” he said.
I reached for my cup of tea. Alex reached for his.
He went on. “Then I was good and caught. The lady who caught me caught me thoroughly, and she turned out to be not even remotely as sweet-natured and forgiving as your mom. Funny enough, neither did all the other folks who caught wind and started catching on to my earlier acts of skulduggery. So the short and the long of it is that I went to jail, for a lot of thieving and for a very long time. Whereas, if your mother had only done the right thing in the first place and turned me in, it would have been my first offense, and a lot less money, so I would have been treated a lot more leniently and I would have learned my lesson and not done it again. So as you can see, your mother is, of course, very much responsible for much of the hard times that have befallen me in this life. Were it not for her, I would have been a different man altogether.”
A funny sensation had come over me at some point during that statement from my uncle. It was not unlike the brain-boiling, eye-swimming surrealness of the hotbox sauna experience.
“Excuse me?” I said. I sounded just like Clint Eastwood when I said it. I even squinted.
A sly grin slipped across Alex’s face. He knew what he was doing. Did he know why, was the question.
“And I would have killed myself,” he added just as Jerry set the food down in front of us.
“You would not,” I insisted, and took a bite of one of my dishes, the one shaped like fish cakes.
“Yes, I would, Elvin, believe it. But it wouldn’t have been the dramatic way. It would have been the Bishop way, gradually over time. Would have killed myself with my appetites. With the smoke and the drink and the drugs, with the food, and the fun, and the foolishness.”
“What,” I said, with my mouth now filled with the second cake which turned out to be luscious, “are you saying you liked prison? That prison was a good place, and it made you such a great guy?”
“No, I didn’t like it. But it was a good place, for me. It was the right place, for me. My father never reached my age. His father never reached my age. Your father, never reached my age. And it all started changing for me in jail. I lost and found all the important things while I was inside. I lost my weight, and my thirst, and my crazy compulsiveness. I found discipline, I found respect, and I found God, none of which I had before I went in. It was miraculous.”
“An embarrassment of riches,” I said, kind of smart mouth.
“No, more of an embarrassment of embarrassments, but you don’t necessarily need to hear about all those. What you do need to hear about is how I came out of there knowing I owed you guys, you and your mom, even more than I owed you before. And even though it took me some time to work up the guts to get here, I’m here to tell you thanks. Thanks, and a whole lot more than thanks.”
I kept eating all through his talk, staring at him, then at my food, then away altogether. Then at him.
“You’re welcome,” I said tentatively.
Alex reached for my bottle of beer.
“Hey,” I said.
He frowned. “You didn’t think this was for you, did you? You’re not old enough.”
“So why didn’t you just order it for yourself?”
“Hush,” Alex said, “it’s Jerry. He likes to watch my health.”
Quickly Alex took a long, hard drink from the bottle, then slipped it back in front of me. “Ahhh,” he said, with real satisfaction. “Sometimes it’s really nice, having somebody to take an interest in your well-being.” He stopped there, sat back, looked away, and listened to his own words. “Yes, sometimes, it is really, really nice, to have somebody caring for your well-being. But then sometimes you have to get away from it too.”
He looked back at me then, after the words were gone, and smiled. Then it flattened out again, like the corners of his mouth were too heavy to hold up for very long.
“So then let’s do that,” I said. “Let’s take a look at your well-being.”
“All right, let’s do. You know how I had the diabetes, but that’s under control now. Then there was the cancer from the sugar substitutes, but that’s gone, too, along with my toes, and a couple of other things that I really didn’t need anyway. You’ll find that as you get older, that really we’re like them rockets they shoot off into space. They get up there and don’t need the extra parts, fuel tanks, and whatnot they needed at the beginning. So things can start dropping off you, and you don’t really miss them.”
He smiled again. Then he stole the rest of the beer.
“I have to say, you do seem to have a knack for taking the bright side, Uncle Alex.”
He pointed at me like a teacher. Like an old teacher. “I do, Elvin, you know, I do. I never had that when I was young, but I do now, and I’m making sure I enjoy the crap out of it from here on. Right, like, here’s one. Cancer. Bright side...”
“It has a bright side.”
“Yup. For me it does, anyhow. I was in this bar. I was out of jail, I had reformed and all... but I was still relearning. How to be, you know. One step forward, one step back kind of thing. So I was having one of my one steps back. And so I got into a bit of a bust up, which I used to do back when.”
“You were a fighter? You look like I could take you. And if you knew how much of an insult that was, you’d probably hit me with a chair right now.”
“I was a fighter. Remember, I used to be notably bigger. But more importantly, I was a veteran. Of the fighting. And that’s the key. I wasn’t any world champion, but the thing about me was, I had been hit. A lot. Now, a thing happens to a guy when he gets hit a lot....”
Alex signaled for another beer. Jerry came over. “This for you?” he asked.
“Not for me, no,” Alex said.
“Then why you raising your hand? Why not him?”
Alex looked at him, which was me. He stared and waited.
And waited.
I was not raising my hand. I did not want a beer. Why would I be raising my hand?
Alex, a man with apparently no time for wasting, reached over and helped me raise my hand.
Jerry made a disapproving groan, but went off to get the beer anyway.
“I’d like a Diet Coke?” I called after him.
“So, I was saying, when you get hit a lot like I did, something happens to you.”
“Ya,” I said, “you get hurt. Even I know that.”
“No. You stop getting hurt. You stop caring whether you get hit or not, and you concentrate on taking a piece out of the other guy. That, my friend, is when a guy becomes very scary indeed. That, is what I was. Scary. Tough.”
“Nuts,” I said, filling my mouth with noodles.
“Nuts is right,” Alex said. “And coincidentally, that brings us back to my story. I was in this fight, in this bar, when the guy takes a wild flying whack at mine. Nuts, that is. With them big pointy ol’ cowboy boots. And scores a direct hit.”
I put my fork down, and rested my hands in my lap. My Diet Coke came, along with the beer. I rested the Diet Coke in my lap.
“I see you’re uncomfortable there,” Alex said, clearly relishing the job at hand. “But fear not. That is where cancer’s good side came in.”
I waited. He grinned. Seemed to take about three hours.
“’Cause I don’t have any. Nuts. They had to come off, some time back, surgically. Replaced ’em with these rubbery fakes. The super balls, I called them. So the guy punts me right up the middle, and while it surely did hurt—kind of like getting punched in the armpit—it didn’t hurt anything like it was supposed to. So I played it up, and played it so cool, just put my fists on my hips like Superman and scowled at the guy. I have to be a little bit immodest here and say, it was quite a moment for me.
“He was impressed. He backed away. Then just went back to the bar. Which was good, because the guy was stomping me up till then, and would have continued to do so until probably I was dead. I wasn’t a good fighter anymore, you see.
“So cancer saved my life.”
Maybe it was his story, or maybe it was something in the air, since I was sitting there with my mouth hanging open, but I started feeling a flashy, burning sensation all around my mouth.
“Ouch,” I said. I was speaking to the food and the story together.
“Want to try mine?” he said.
“Have you tried yours?” I said because I knew he hadn’t.
“I’m getting to it,” he said. “You want a taste?”
“You have any diseases I might actually catch?”
“Don’t think so,” he said, and extended a spoonful of his white, chunky soup.
I took it.
“Nothing contagious since the prison doc killed off the last of the syphilis and the leprosy.”
You know that thing, where you already have something in your mouth, then you get grossed out before you can manage to swallow?
I held the soup in my mouth, struggling, thinking what to do.
Till the soup decided for me.
“Yeow,” I said, after I had involuntarily swallowed the flaming ball of liquid.
“I know,” he said, “it is fantastic stuff.” Then he took a big sip of the beer. Oh no, he took a complete, draining slug of the beer. “I usually don’t eat anyplace else.”
“Or here, either,” I said.
“Aw, I’m just not starving right now, that’s all.”
“Starving is actually what you do look like,” I said. “Eat your food.”
“That’s nice,” Alex said. “That is so nice, you worrying about me. Thank you.”
“I’m not worrying,” I said, picking up my fork in order to change the subject. Then with two more quick, spicy bites, I had finished my whole meal without his taking any of his.
“You really should pace yourself more, Elvin,” he said. “You know, I look at you and frankly, I gotta say you are the perfect recipe for a Dead Bishop.”
“You wanting a Dead Bishop, Mr. Bishop?” Jerry was back, and speaking from underneath a big frown.
“No, Jerry, sorry, I was just talking about something else.”
“What’s he talking about?” I asked. “Is that something you can order here? A Dead Bishop?”
Alex got a kind of whimsical, faraway look on his face. “You know, Jerry, now that you mention it...”
“No,” Jerry said. “And I didn’t mention it, you did.”
“Aw, go on, make me a Dead Bishop.”
“What’s a Dead Bishop?” I asked nervously.
“This is,” Jerry said, pointing with both hands at my uncle, “if he doesn’t behave himself.”
“It’s a drink, Elvin,” Alex said in a soft, calm, serene, creepy voice. “It’s a lovely, lovely drink. I invented it. It has green tea in it.”
“It has everything in it,” Jerry insisted.
“Ya, ya,” Alex said warmly, as if this were a good thing.
He didn’t finish his soup. I finished his soup. He finished two Dead Bishops instead. I had coconut ice cream for desert. It was about the creamiest ice cream I ever ate, and just what my tongue needed. Alex had a bite. He started looking very tired before the check came. Then he pulled out his gold credit card and paid.
“What are you doing, Alex?” I said.
“Call me Dad, wouldja?”
“No, I wouldjn’t,” I said.
“Oh. Then call me Uncle Alex, at least. Could you do that for me?”
“I could, yes. What are you doing, Uncle Alex?”
“Ah that’s nice. Could you say it again?”
“What are you doing, Uncle Alex?” I snapped.
“Paying the bill.”
“No. I mean, I thought you didn’t drink anymore?”
“No, but I don’t drink any less, either.” He could barely get the words out before busting up with big, fat guffaws of laughter. “I love when I get to say that,” he said.
And he guffawed a little more. Then he laughed. Then chuckled, grunted, then stopped. Next I knew, his head dipped, his chin hit his chest, and he went into mumbling, slurring, spluttering weak, unintelligible sounds to himself.
“Alex?” I said. Then I reached across to shake him. “Alex?”
He didn’t respond. Even the noises stopped as he went limp in my hand. Then when I sat back, he sat forward, flopping onto the table.
I looked around, stupid and helpless. “Jerry,” I called, like I was calling my own mother rather than a Thai waiter I had met less than an hour ago.
But he was there. On the scene, on the case, and prepared.
“Come on, Mr. Bishop,” Jerry said, picking my uncle right up off the table roughly. He kept talking to him and jostling him about as he stuffed chocolate-covered cookies into his mouth. “Come on, Mr. Bishop,” Jerry said, louder and more motherly. “Chew now. Chew for me. How many of my customers actually make me do the chewing for them now? You are a very lazy customer, Mr. Bishop. Come on now....”
He was great. Jerry was great. I had never seen a waiter act like this before. I could not have imagined anybody acting like this before. Taking care of a man, like he was a helpless baby. Like he was his own helpless baby. I would have figured somebody acting like my uncle was acting would get thrown out of a restaurant, rather than cared for, and I was thoroughly embarrassed by it all, to be honest.
“Sorry,” I said as Jerry simmered down a little and Alex simmered up.
“Sorry for what?” Jerry asked. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. Sorry... for all this.”
“Oh well, it happens. You should have made him eat, though. He must eat. The blood sugar gets too low... happens just like that.”
“It’s happened before?”
“Oh yes. Fortunately, he was not my first diabetic. We have quite a few regulars. Guess we got some kind of reputation. Come here for the service. I think he does this on purpose, though, to get the free cookies.”
“I do not,” Alex said sternly. He was wide awake now, and slumped sideways in Jerry’s grip. Like a fighter who’d just been counted out and was being treated by his cornerman. “I can pay for my own cookies. They weren’t even that good.” He straightened up, a little wobbly, but a new man compared to a few minutes earlier.
“What do you think”—Jerry laughed—“I break out the fresh cookies for the seizures?” He gave Alex a friendly pat on the shoulder before walking away. “And no more Dead Bishops,” he said.
“No,” Alex said sheepishly, staring across at me with a bit of a blush rising in his cheeks.
“I thought you said you didn’t have the diabetes anymore?” I felt like I could be bossy and angry and parental now, so I went with it.
“I don’t, but I don’t have it any less,” he said with a smaller laugh. “It came back, I guess. Won’t happen again.”
I felt my brows knitting together. Felt like a lot of work. I couldn’t understand why parental types were so fond of it. “About what percent of the time would you say you tell the truth, Alex?”
“Would I say? I would say one hundred percent. That’s what I would say.”
I did ask.
“That was scary, Alex,” I said.
“Uncle Alex.”
“No.” I was still feeling too parental. I’d say the cycle was complete now.
He must have noticed, because he got all juvenile. His head sunk to his chin again, but I could tell by the almost lifelike way he held his body that it wasn’t a seizure this time.
“Hey,” I snapped.
He looked up. And caught me five hundred miles off my guard.
His eyes were loose in their sockets, like they were some tiny child’s eyes shoved into his full-grown head. And they were swimming, floating in all that space, in all that red space.
I didn’t want to see this. Nobody wants to see this. You don’t want to see babies or girls or crybabies cry, people who are supposed to cry, never mind adult jailbird people who are not supposed to. Not if you have a heart, you don’t want to see that, and even if he is not full-on crying you don’t want to see it, don’t want to see crying or anything related to crying, which this was.
And you don’t ever want to see yourself crying or anything like crying, which is exactly what is likely to happen if you have anything like a heart and you are exposed to anything like the wrong people crying.
“Uncle, okay? Uncle. There, uncle. Uncle Alex. I don’t see why you have to be reminded, anyway. That’s what you are. It’s not as if I can fire you or demote you or rip some stripes off your arm now, is it? You went away for a million years, lied and stole and hid and God knows what else, and then came back and poof there you were, all uncle on me anyway. So you don’t really need to be that insecure, do you? The job is yours. You are my uncle, okay? It’s a job for life, like a judge or Tom Jones or something, so relax. You are my uncle.”
Through it all I kept looking down and away and back at Uncle Alex’s liquid eyes to check for signs of progress or complete screwing up. I found—of course, because life is so hysterically funny and unfair and inconclusive—signs of both. A weak smile was making its way like a lost wagon train across his lower face, while the waterworks only increased up there at the top.
“Will you go someplace with me?”
I couldn’t decide whether to be worried or frustrated. I’d most likely get around to both.
“I am someplace with you,” I said, pointing at the other tables with place settings and cloth napkins and wineglasses. “And the other day, I was at another someplace with you.” I raised my mighty right arm, rolled up my sleeve, and pointed at my brand-new hulking biceps. It looked okay, as long as you didn’t poke it with a finger.
“A different someplace,” he said, graciously nodding approval at my muscle. “I want to take you to see somebody.”
It set off bells. My mother suggested once that she wanted me to see somebody. I knew what that meant.
“I’m not crazy,” I said. “I’m just big boned.”
He stared at me in such a bemused way, I thought he was maybe slipping into another seizure.
“Oh, you are crazy, Elvin,” he said, rising carefully but steadily from his seat, “but we’re not going to see somebody for you, we’re going to see somebody for me. And I need you there.”
Alex didn’t wait for a response, just headed on out of the restaurant. I followed. Wasn’t like I was going to argue with him, was I? He needed me. He needed something anyway, someone, that was for sure. And for right now I was that something.
He had succeeded in this much, whether he was trying to or not: he had made me feel pretty important. And that didn’t happen every day.
“Alex,” I said as I caught up to him out on the street, “are you talking about now? Are we going to meet somebody now?”
“I’d like to,” he said, and I could hear the old wheezing like when he’d winded himself on the tuba, “but I’m not going to be up to it. Stamina... seems to be becoming... more of a problem.”
“Sure,” I said, “fine. Whenever.”
“Whenever is tomorrow. Tomorrow is whenever, Elvin.”
“Okay,” I said, and walked along right beside him, not touching him, but being handy just in case.
He seemed steady enough by the time we reached my house. But not so steady I wasn’t nervous. “You want to come in?” I asked.
He just shook his head.
“Why not? Come see Ma.”
He didn’t seem to like that idea at all. He looked embarrassed, looking down, looking away, shuffling his feet. He shook his head more vigorously.
“That’s just foolish,” I said, and mounted the stairs. “But just wait here so she can say hi.”
As I was unlocking the door, I looked back over my shoulder and he was already gone.