The Sin Eater 13: Hand After Hand Part 1

There were so many things going on at this time in my life that I really can’t nail any of it down. I’m going to throw a few things around. Let’s call it a few hands of poker. Some are wins where I pull in the pot. A lot of them are losses, times I tried to bluff but came up short. And there are quite a few that I just put down and folded.

Poker. I guess in some ways I’m related to the Devil, too. I will play his game for a while.

I remember witnessing Uncle Ball and Aunt Easy get married. She wore a very flattering dress that did not fit what I knew of her. There was no sex in it at all and there was no real ceremony. He wore a nice shirt and, I think a tie, but I can’t be sure. He had sold his Camaro and bought a car more fitting for a man raising another man’s son. And they were married by a stern looking judge. There were only a few people in the room. I think Rose. I think Aunt. Mumble wasn’t there. Uncle Savior wasn’t there. Less was not invited. Stone was in Waynesville and so was Grandma. Uncle Ball insisted that I be there. None of her family showed up.

They got married at the court house. I wanna say because no one could afford a wedding, but I don’t think that was it. I think it was more like neither of them wanted God to see what was happening. The judge had a big leather bound book he read from. The vows were not the same. They sounded weird on the air, like they didn’t mean the same. Or maybe it was the Number.

Maybe the vows were exactly the same but when spoken by a man that had lost Glass. That had admitted to me the only thing in life was a contest going on between all of the Mocking Men, where all of them were trying to find out who could fuck the most women, ruin the most lives and laugh about it later, when vows were being spoken by that man they didn’t seem the same.

I clapped when it was over. He kissed her. Rose was furious that it all wasn’t happening in a church. She didn’t clap. Aunt, I think did. The judge went off to do what I hope was justice and Aunt Easy walked over to me. She wrapped her wrists around the back of my neck and pulled me in for a hug. She whispered in my ear.

“Now we are family. Now everything means so much more.”

They got their pictures taken at the Domes. May have mentioned them before. They are a collection of massive glass dome buildings in Milwaukee where flowers, trees, and bushes from other lands are grown. There are walking paths and three habitats.

The temperate forest. I think they had pictures taken there. The jungle. I think they had pictures taken there. And a desert. That is where all the pictures should have been taken. She glowed in the pictures. But nothing she could do could ever compare to Glass. When he stood next to Easy, it was perverse. It was like he was standing next to a wet condom. He did not glow anymore. He was not a hero anymore. He was just a guy I was bound to that I fiercely loved but could not grasp. There was no going back. No way I could ever find peace with him. We had glimpses of each other. I will show you a few. He showed me horrors of manhood that I will try forever to forget. But as I watched them take pictures, I could see he had gone dim.

I played that one when I should have folded. That hand was definitely a loss. Just keep dealing. See what comes of this next hand.

We moved to Waynesville. He was already there. He was working at Pizza Hut again. He had gotten Cici, had tried to sex Bubbly, but she told me later he had been unable to get things going, and she was not going to suck him hard.

When we were planning to move there, Mumble called Uncle Ball. Asked him if he could get a manager job at the place Uncle Ball worked. Uncle Ball assured him he could. That Mumble would walk into a manager job when he got there.

Mumble’s first day he went in hot, but dropped under ice when he was told that for the moment he was a part-time dish boy who had to work his way up like anyone else. Now we were all drowning under ice and only the Church could bust through.

Grandma and Grandpa had moved. They no longer lived on Uncle Wrath’s property. I don’t have the story. Probably will never get it. Most likely Uncle Wrath bought them a tiny house for Stone to die in, or they started renting. Uncle Wrath moved into the back trailer, double wide and Uncle Ball moved upstairs.

Up above the tiny house was a storage spot. It was a glorified crawl space. No more than twelve feet deep and no more than ten feet wide. It had a sloping ceiling that came down low on each side and didn’t lift high enough to stand. Uncle Ball lived there. He had a mattress, and I think a TV. He had clothes I’m sure, but no dresser. Maybe a trunk, I don’t know.

He said he had caught Aunt Easy cheating on him. “I swear to God, that bitch was cheating on me. That fucking whore. Who the fuck does she think she is to be letting some little dick fuck that pussy? Was sorry to see that mouth go, but no way I’m staying married to a whore. No one can put up with that.” He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. It was then that I realized I could not look him in the eye while he said that. “If any bitch is low enough to cheat on you, drop her instantly. You marry a girl, or even date a girl, you own her pussy. She can’t give it out to anyone else. Ever.” He shook his head when he saw Guardian’s eyes. I think he saw a bit of the hypocrisy and was unable to keep my gaze.

“Now don’t tell anyone. I told everyone down here that I got tired of her bitching. Grandma is furious. She started talking about how that girl had named her kid after me and blah, blah, but Wrath jumped on that shit quick.

“He said that was not Ball’s kid and it doesn’t matter if she named him Dumbo, Ball doesn’t owe that fucking kid anything. Your Grandpa Stone agreed. No way to stay for the kid if the mom is trash, right?” He looked at me, “Hey Jesse, I can’t stay for the kid I wanted to raise. I had no custody rights and I was not going to pay child support for a kid that— I mean, I couldn’t stay in Milwaukee just for the kid.”

“Yeah,” Guardian said.

“Doesn’t change anything or anything. Would still raise another man’s kid if it came to that. I proved that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, do you remember this?” He reached behind his mattress and pulled out the BB gun rifle he had used in Milwaukee to hunt mice with Mumble. “Well, there’s a loud fuckin’ dog in the neighbor’s yard. Barks all the time. Was keeping Stone awake, and me. Decided I’d fix the problem. Every night I go out and shoot that thing with this BB gun until it shuts the fuck up. I think the owners hear it yelp and whine, but they never come out to stop me, because I’m a badass. Everybody knows I’m a badass.” He put the gun across his lap and looked me in the eye. “You know I’m a badass, right?”

“Yeah, I know you’re a badass.”

But see, the thing is this. Ball came down to live in Waynesville years ago, and he decided to finish school in Waynesville. Small town, big fish. He’d rule things in days. And Waynesville is a small town, for elementary school and middle school. But when you leave middle school, Fort Leonard Wood empties all its kids directly into Waynesville High School. Hard kids. Army brats from all over the country. Ball was in that school for one day before he walked into the office, quit school, and got his GED. When he left his private school, entered public school again, he couldn’t stand up.

He left and went back to Milwaukee when he saw what he did to Mumble at Pizza Hut and the effect it had on our family, and when I got baptized Southern Baptist. I asked Rose if he was still my godfather and she snarled at me.

“No, we don’t believe that. Southern Baptists don’t have godchildren. It’s not in the Bible anyway. No we don’t believe in that. He is just your Uncle Ball.”

But after that he was gone.

I had lost Jazz. When he asked if I had ever gotten her digit, I gave him a death stare. He never asked about her again. X was gone. I had barely any goodbye from him, but I know that he hurt when I left him. He had no one else.

I folded that hand. I folded somewhere in a storage room above a dying man.

There was a tribute concert for George Harrison when he died. So many people, amazing musicians, came out and talked about Harrison, and they played his songs. It all came down to the song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” There were about twelve people playing instruments as Tom Petty sang. Four guitars, including Harrison’s son played, until at the end of the song, the fifth stepped out.

It was Prince. Remember him? Uncle Ball said he didn’t count as a nigger because of how much pussy landed at his feet. Remember “Darling Nikki”? Remember “When Doves Cry”? Well, he was the fifth guitar. He stepped out of the shadows at the end and he was the finale of the tribute. He played a golden and black flecked Telecaster that had been with him through his entire career.

The solo Prince played was gorgeous. It was a thing of mastery and beauty. It was the greatest guitar solo I have ever heard. It made all the other guitarists on the stage look like children. He wore a red bowler hat, with a red shirt open to the middle of his stomach, and a black coat, and he was the greatest musician in the world in that moment. Maybe all moments, but for sure that one.

When the solo was over, he tossed it into the crowd. It had been with him all of his life, but he tossed it and just strutted off the stage while the crowd clapped. He didn’t stay for the applause. It wasn’t about him. It was about George.

That was me and Uncle Ball. There was no one else on the stage worth a shit. He was the only thing that was happening in my life, until he wasn’t. The summer in Waynesville when I was ten. That was his solo. It was glowing and perfect, and for that one month, he was the greatest, most amazing person in the world.

I’m sure I failed him when I moved to Allenton and Shadow was born. But it was dead anyway. I failed him because I never started playing the game. Part of me knew he was never going to be my father. I was furious at him for that. Shadow had come to be without the influence of Ball at all. Now Shadow was ruling things. He was in constant battle with Guardian and it was getting out of hand.

Uncle Ball knew something was wrong, but he never understood it. He hasn’t read any of Reality of the Unreal Mind. That is obvious by the message he sent me a few days ago. He doesn’t know about my DID. But if anyone asked him about me, he would tell them something was wrong. Something was just not right about me and he was one of the only people that knew it.

He left. He went to Milwaukee and he worked it out with Aunt Easy. I guess they had never gotten divorced, or I am remembering this all fuzzy, but the next time I saw him, he was with her.

It was another summer trip. A trip that destroyed my entire family, created the beginnings of a monster and saw me dark and falling. He was there for that trip. Two weeks. Me with my godfather, who was no longer my godfather. Less with her godmother, who was no longer her godmother. And Grasp with his godfather. If you look at it with your head twisted to the side, Grasp was the only one that was actually raised by his godfather. But if you want to say it that way, you have to accept some really demented things.

I lost that hand, too. But I played it ’til the end. Don’t get cocky. I’m better at poker than this chapter shows.

After this trip, the world started burning. Nothing good could stand for long. I’m going to take you the rest of the way. Me and Uncle Ball have years together still. It all gets so much worse. All of it becomes monstrous.

He never understood why I never became a Mocking Man. This book is me trying to explain it to him.

Let’s get on with it. The fire is roaring. Let’s dance around it. See how close we can get to it without all of you getting burned. As for me, I lived it. I’m burnt head to toe.