He never got to be my godfather. Parents don’t die even when you want them to, and as the time stretched on and we realized it was not going to happen, things changed.
I think when he was with Glass, a certain kind of utopia was created in Uncle Ball’s mind and it involved raising me. He was teaching me how to be a Mocking Man and all that it entailed. Now I was all he had left of her. Or maybe I was his only judge. Maybe I was his Sin Eater again after she left. After he lost her, his focus on me began to strengthen and all of it became more pronounced.
Then Grandpa and Grandma moved.
Uncle Wrath had been in the army for years but that time came to an end. The last army base he was stationed at was Fort Leonard Wood and Uncle Wrath met a man. The man was smart. He was kind. He was funny the way a fart is funny and his name was Homer. Homer D Boner was the nickname that Uncle Wrath had always been called by the Princes. And when Uncle Wrath met a man named Homer in Waynesville, things slowly began to take off.
Aunt Honey was lodged in there somewhere. Wrath said he would only ever marry a virgin, and he found that in Aunt Honey. He had always been obsessed with Native American culture. A few of the Princes were Native American, and meeting her just seemed like the ringing of a pristine chime. Whirlwind. I hope it was a whirlwind romance and once he found her, he decided that he needed to get out of the army.
He had been a nurse. She was a nurse. They would continue to work on post as civilians, but the rifle was over. Homer taught him to fish. Taught him to hunt, although I do not remember Wrath hunting often. Homer was the man who talked Wrath into buying property and once he had, he wanted to move Stone and Grandma to Waynesville.
Waynesville really is a magical place. It’s small but spread out in an odd way that makes it not seem it. It has assholes. Well everywhere has assholes, but there were enough assholes to make it seem like a big city. Enough amazing people to make it charming. Waynesville would be a slowing down of Stone’s life and with the heart attacks coming over and over again, it was a needed change of pace. The tipping point lied on two things. The land that Uncle Wrath bought had three trailers on it. The front trailer was old and very run down. Almost unlivable. The middle trailer, better but not great, and the back trailer was a double wide and big enough for Grandpa and Grandma. Everything was set except Uncle Ball.
Uncle Ball was still in school and didn’t want to leave it or his friends. He could not afford to live in the great big house alone and so a deal was brokered. Rose’s family would move into the Mocking Home and pay a bit of rent. Smaller than other places but not free. Also in the agreement was the fact that Uncle Ball would live with us.
The house had a good-sized living room right up front, a larger living room as you went deeper into the house, and then a huge kitchen. The kitchen shot off in two directions. Farther back it led to a kind of porch/catch-all area with a small, uninsulated room on the right. To the left went the step down to the basement, still dirt floored. And past that, the back door to a massive fenced in yard.
The other way to get out of the kitchen was to go right as soon as you entered it and you got to the bathroom. Pretty basic except the back corner had a door that wouldn’t shut that led to an insanely steep staircase leading to the attic. When you got there, you found a small catch-all room where sat a table and chairs. Right off that was Uncle Ball’s cool room. And if you turned left after the stairs and walked past a little crawl space, you hit the great room. This room was massive. The ceiling sloped down on both sides and it was so big that walking across it was almost a chore. Here the carpet was thin. Here heat gathered, making it almost unlivable in the summer, and here you found me and Grasp’s room. His bed sat on the left, mine the right pushed all the way against the front wall. With both doors open, you could sit on the center of my bed and look across the entire attic into Ball’s room.
Two other rooms on the main floor and you have nearly a mansion for our family. It was an amazing place to live. And it was where the great horrors of Less’s and my life would begin. The entire family would fall here. It was as if the place was cursed.
When we lived here, we found out that Less had been molested by Char. When we lived here, Mumble lost his job and plunged us into destitute poverty. And here is where I met Aunt Easy.
She was not Aunt Easy at the time. At the time she was just Easy. She was gorgeous the way a song can be gorgeous. A song that starts off slow, a song that smiles at your ear as you hear it. Something like “30,000 Pounds of Bananas.” That is where I want to go with this. That song will work. It’s a tune by the immense Harry Chapin about a young, inexperienced truck driver delivering bananas to Scranton, Pennsylvania, who forgets that steep mountains surround him. He can’t stop and that truck filled with 30,000 pounds of bananas crashes and destroys almost everything.
That is a great way to describe Easy.
She was beautiful and funny. Had dark hair, and God took his time when he crafted her body. She charmed Rose almost instantly. Mumble said almost nothing to her, which was his way of masturbation, and she was introduced to me.
When she met me, she kissed me on the lips.
One more thing about this house. We rented. The mice owned the house. They were my horror, and if you need that story again, find the beginning of Teardrop Road. Mumble and Uncle Ball found a unique way to deal with the horde of mice.
They bought BB guns. Mumble, a weird looking pistol that pumped. Uncle Ball went with a rifle quite like that one in A Christmas Story. When they found a mouse, they shot at it. Ginger, our shepherd mix, would hunt it down and corner it. The guys would make sport of shooting it and they would kill it good, as thirty other places in the house, sixty other mice fucked to create 180 other mice born in 21-24 days.
Well Uncle Ball got a job at a spot called Scanda House, a buffet style restaurant, and he found a group of different friends. I remember them getting drunk and opening my door. Uncle Ball would sit in his room and fire BBs into my room that flew right over my bed, into the shelves there, and damaged nearly everything I had. He broke my alarm clock one night and I was late for school.
And the entire time, he and his friends laughed and I screamed. That was how Uncle Ball punished me for not being him and Glass’s son.
Uncle Ball found Dungeons and Dragons and brought it to my parents. Rose ran the games and Ball and Mumble played. She ran off of modules, which is a packet that has all the maps, monsters, plot and treasure all set out for the game. They played every night. I was allowed to play after homework that didn’t get finished and chores done as quick and messy as I could get away with.
They played for months until it became obvious that while Rose and Mumble were not looking Uncle Ball was going through the module finding the secrets of the game and exploiting them.
But that is just the scene. The story is Easy. It’s real easy.
Stone had a heart attack about once a year. His life swung like a pendulum blade descending to slice him to death, and all of the family had to rush to Waynesville to say goodbye and wait for him to die. He would pull through, because it is almost impossible to kill a Son of the Devil, and we would all go home.
Easy and Uncle Ball fucked almost constantly. She started having him open the door so while I tried to sleep I could hear them. She started coming to my door, after Uncle Ball had fallen asleep, and opening the door, with the light of the side room shining on my bed and me cowered in it, so she could stare at me while I slept.
It really warmed up when Grandpa had a heart attack. We all had to go down there and she decided she had to come with us. Uncle Ball had no car at the time and he had to ride with us.
For a minute we have to talk Chevy.
Mumble was devoted to the make. He said he would rather die than drive anything else, and after driving his Chevy Blazer to death, he bought another car. I knew what it looked like. After this story, you will know why I never forgot it. And I talked to Rayph about it tonight.
I bought a pack of cigarettes tonight. I knew that tonight would be dedicated to Easy, so I had to. While I sat outside with the weight of tonight’s story hanging over my head, Rayph took every one of my descriptions and figured out that it was a Chevy Caprice Classic. Boxy and brown with a two-tone kind of beige, it was a four door with velour seats of beige. Mumble was upset that he couldn’t get another Blazer, but he was also excited about a few of the features the Caprice Classic gave him. He took us on a ride as soon as he got it, and while driving, he stretched his legs and dropped both of his work boots on the passenger side dash. The car kept rolling. We had never seen anything like this type of magic, and that was how I was introduced to Cruise Control. The seats were soft, but when that heart attack hit, it was a tight fit.
Mumble drove most of the way. He had a real problem with the driving long distances thing, though. Somehow in his mind he decided that when he started to get tired, he needed to slow down. Soon it’s night and he is doing 30 on the highway. Rose would let him drive for a while, then as his eyes became heavier, she would take over.
She spent most of the time in the passenger seat with Grasp in a baby seat between them on the bench seat. Then right-to-left across the back seat sat Less, Uncle Ball, Easy, and me. We were all scrunched up as much as you can be for an eight-hour drive that, with Mumble’s driving, easily became a ten, little money for food and almost no bathroom breaks. We left after Mumble got home from work, so we got in the car at about five and she started rubbing my crotch at about ten.
Less was asleep. Uncle Ball asleep, Easy laying against him, her head resting on the sweet spot between the shoulder and the pec, eyes closed, breathing softly, faking sleep, and there was a blanket. Beneath it was her hand. It was shoved between my legs and her fingertips massaged my tiny member as we drove. A few times in the beginning, I gently pushed her hand away. But after the third of those, I looked at her and she lifted her head. She placed the side of her finger against her perfect lips and she smiled.
Hand back under the blanket and she pretended to sleep as she worked Shush. Char was raping him on a regular basis at this point. Her shadow had fallen across my cowering form at night more than a few times. Shush leaned his forehead against the window, and watched the cars and semis pass him as he slowly, silently wept.
Bathroom break and I am looking for her. I see no one except Mumble messing with a coffee maker. Uncle Ball, I left in the bathroom. Rose is talking to Less by the soda, and Easy is nowhere to be found. I rush out to the car to get a little time by myself, and when I drop into my seat, the blanket beside me rises. Easy looks at me like I am a meal. She pulls in tight and licks my sweating neck. She sticks her mouth against my ear and moans.
“You are making this my favorite road trip ever,” she says.
Rose, Mumble, Less and Ball are back in the car and we are pulling away. Blanket returns, and as she kisses Uncle Ball and murmurs into his ear, sucking his earlobe and giggling, her hand goes back to working on me.
Highway. And we are back on a quest to find a dying Stone, and fear and tears from Shush.
He didn’t remember that night until this one. Bekah is sleeping in my office again. She does this on the most upsetting writing nights. Peanut is cuddled up with her, and I can hear him moaning and whining as he feels the power of the emotion I am suffering.
I have one more horror to whisper to all of you before I go smoke a cigarette and prepare to write the next chapter.
One night she came to my room naked. I had been very asleep. I had never seen a woman fully naked before. Never seen the full power of a naked woman. I opened my eyes and, through my exhaustion, saw her lit up and golden from the hallway light. She was standing close to my bed. She crouched down right beside me and reached under the blanket.
“Do you want me to put it in my mouth?” she whispered.
I was frozen. I could only stare at her. I saw another silhouette in the doorway.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Shush looked at the shadow at the door. He put his finger to his lips and said “Shhh,” as he wept.
I was being taught. I was being instructed on how to work my number. I wasn’t trying. I hadn’t been looking for it or asking for it. It was Easy.
Jesse Teller 
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