“She was at her mom’s the other day and I had a girl lined up,” Uncle Ball said. “Got a babysitter. Girl was only 15 but a piece of ass. I looked at her and smiled and said, ‘You sucking dick yet?’ She kinda squirmed a little and nodded. I wanted to see what she would say so I said, ‘I don’t see it.’”
I was driving down the outer road where the church sat. I expected to stop at his house at the end of the road but he pulled into the church parking lot.
“This little slut looked at me and opened her mouth wide enough to fit even me in it. I just busted a gut laughing. She is only 15 and I don’t do that but I am going to keep her number. Might be able to find her when she turns 18.”
My head felt as if it were in a vise. I could not hardly breathe and I looked at him as if he was crazy.
“Just kidding. Look, I’m out.”
“What?” The words didn’t make any sense and I needed him to clarify. I really had no idea what he was talking about.
“Come here. I want to show you something.”
“Why are we here? We are headed to your house.”
“Maybe. Look, get out here. I want to show you something,” Uncle Ball said. He slammed the car door behind him and I looked around. I knew this entire place. There was nothing in this area that I hadn’t been to. The church youth group spent a lot of time outside the church. There was nothing he could show me that would make any sense. Then I heard the trunk open.
Outside and he has turned his back and is looking at his watch. I looked in the trunk to see a big duffle bag stuffed with what, I didn’t know.
“Look, there is someone I want you to meet,” he said. He seemed sad, but hopeful at the same time. He looked at me then at his feet.
I looked again at the trunk, seeing nothing else of any interest. “What’s with the bag?”
“Yeah, well see, things are complicated now.”
“Complicated how?”
“Well, Breezy is breaking up I think. She begged me to—” He kicked the gravel and shook his head. “She is getting desperate.”
Conscience. When it came to women I didn’t know he had one.
“I’m not sure what she is going to do and she is just not right for me. I just can’t take it anymore.” He looked at me with a wavering kind of gentle look. “You’re 18.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, I guessed you might be. Look you’re 18 and I am…” He looked at his watch again. He shook his head and ground his foot back and forth into the gravel. “Jesse, I’m in love,” he said. “And she loves me. She lives right down the road and to the right. You follow that road for about five miles, then turn left for about three trailers and you are there.”
“What’s the bag for?” I asked. I already knew and I knew how this was going to go.
“I’m in love. I know she loves me, too. When she sucks my dick she moans like she is eating her favorite food. She is hot, she is funny. She is perfect. The bag…” He propped his foot up on the bumper and motioned to it. “It’s my bag full of life. I think I’m running away.”
“Running away?”
“Yeah, no one knows where she lives. No one knows she even exists. We have been really careful. I met her a month ago and I haven’t had ass from anyone else or even tried since. She is funny. She is—” He curled a fist, unclenched it and ran his fingers through his hair.
“You’re leaving with her, aren’t you?”
“What do you think?”
Glass. I thought about Glass. I thought about the fact that my Uncle had not talked about love in so many years that I just had no idea how to respond.
“Love?”
“Afraid so. I can’t let her go, man. She is my girl.”
“You’re going to take the bag and the girl and run?”
“She is meeting us here. I wanted you to meet her and maybe come with us,” he said. “You’re 18. It’s not kidnapping. Your mom can pitch a fit but the cops won’t search for you if you call her and tell her we are gone late tonight. By then no one will be able to find us.”
“What about the kids?” Hope, rage, confusion in every emotion, and disgust. But hope that he might be able to escape himself.
“Look, I won’t take the car and leave Breezy with a tiny truck and three kids. I have a plan, though. Me and her leave from here in her car, and you drive this one to my house right up the road. You walk back to the road I described and keep walking. She will pack and we will take off in her car.”
“I am not leaving, Uncle Ball. I love you but I want to graduate.”
“You can enroll in any school close to where we stop. I got a little money saved up. Been thinking about leaving for a while, but now it just seems like jump off now or stay forever. I can’t take Breezy forever.”
“I can’t go with you.”
“Here then, take the keys to my truck. You keep it. It’s in my driveway. I will sign it over to you. You leave Breezy the car and you run off and have a life. I’ll run off and take my love.”
“Okay,” I said. If he left now, then he might have a chance. If he left now, then Breezy might have a chance.
“What about Grandma?”
“Grandpa will make her understand. If not, then Wrath. But first I want you to talk to her. She adores you and maybe you can make her understand.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I have too many things running through my head. I need a plan.”
“Go. Get this bag out of this car and get in her car and take off. Find happiness. I will take care of Little Man and Dewdrop. Don’t worry about them. I can do this for you, just run,” I said. “You need to go.”
A short Blazer pulled in to the parking lot and I looked at the church. Why had he picked this spot? Why not do this from home? No one was there and no one was coming for hours. Why had he chosen to do this here?
It came to me as she opened her door and ran to him. He was looking for God. He was trying to pray in the only way he had left. Through me.
I turned around and she was beautiful. She was thin but had everything that a woman asks for. Breasts, ass, legs. She was pretty and cute and she reminded me of the only other place I had seen that combination. When I thought about Bekah, I knew he had to run off with this girl. Her hair was pixy but spiked, too. She wore clothing that loved her body. She hugged him and he wrapped his arms around her waist and he kissed her. He kissed her long and he kissed her well, and I realized I had only ever seen him kiss two women, Glass and Easy at their wedding. This kiss reminded me of Glass. It had none of the perversion of Easy.
When they pulled apart, they could not pull apart. He pulled his mouth from her reluctantly and put his forehead on hers. I waited.
I wanted this so bad for him. I would raise his kids. I would help them. I would keep them safe and guide them, and when they were old enough I would tell them the story of their father.
“Is that him?” she said.
He turned to face me but could not take his arm from around her waist. “Yeah, this is him. This is Jesse.” They walked up to me and it was not quite how him and Glass moved, but Uncle Ball and this girl were in sync. She stopped in front of me and smiled.
“You’re handsome,” she said. Her voice was pure country, skin tan. And her eyes were alight the way that you would expect a woman in love’s eyes to be.
“Hey, he’s not handsome. You’re mine,” Uncle Ball said.
She turned to face him and laughed. “You’re damn right I am!” she said. She grabbed him around the neck and jumped up, kicking her leg up at the knee. He wrapped his arms around her waist and she looked down at him.
“I don’t have long. I gotta get him home,” Uncle Ball said to her. He looked at his feet and I turned around and shut the trunk. I looked at the church and I thought of Grandma. I thought about how Uncle Ball was a man in two worlds. He had one foot in a man’s world and the other stood firmly in the land of his mother’s time.
“I’ll see you soon,” he told her.
“Yeah.” She reached her hand out to shake mine. “It was great meeting you. We will see each other again, I’m sure.” She turned to him and pointed an elegant finger. “You remember what I said.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not gonna spend one more night in another woman’s bed.”
“I know. I get it. I’m packing tonight.”
“What time will you be at my house? What time are we leaving?” She giggled.
“As soon,” he kissed her, “as,” he kissed her again, “I can.” He kissed her long and hard for the last time.
They stared at each other for a while then she jumped in her Blazer. As she left the parking lot, she beeped her horn twice as she waved out the window and then she threw her head back, howling as she leaned on the horn.
I hugged him.
We got in the car. We drove to my house in silence. “Wanna come in?” I asked.
“No. I got stuff to do,” he mumbled.
“I love you,” I said. “Always.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yeah and the next day.”
“I’ll be here.”
He drove off and I think that is when he got the idea. That is probably when he hatched the single most devastating and evil plan he ever had. I will never forgive him for the next part. I learned a few weeks later that Uncle Ball had no honor.
He picked me up. He had a package of photos in the seat between us. I picked them up and he took them from me. “Later.” He looked at the road as he spoke. “She doesn’t know where I live. She doesn’t know where I work. I have her number and she doesn’t have mine, but I have gotten a few hang up calls the last few weeks, so I know she looked me up in the White Pages. I haven’t seen her again.”
“Why? Look, she will be pissed, but you can tell her you needed more time. That you got scared. You can tell her anything you want and she will accept it. She loves you. Go!”
“No, I have to do this right. There will be another girl.”
“No there will not,” I said. “She is your last chance. I have only ever seen you that way with Glass.”
He shook his head. “Please don’t talk about Glass. We are going to get a pizza then we are going to go see your Grandma. It will take a while, but she will give me permission to divorce Breezy. She has to.”
Pizza was pretty quiet. He told me he had gone on a fuck spree since the break up. He didn’t say how many he added to his number but I guess a lot. He was still working at the factory, but he had gotten the graveyard shift so his afternoons were still free. He was making sport of it. He told me that he had fucked women in his bed. Told me that he had given one girl a pair of Breezy’s underwear to wear and then put them back again without washing them. He told me a lot of terrible things.
Then we went to see Grandma.
“This,” he said to her. “This is what I live in. You ask me why I never let you over to my house. This is the reason right here. The woman is a pig.”
Grandma sifted through the roll of film he had developed and her face screwed up in disgust. I took each picture after she saw it and I could see that he was taking pictures of his house. Unwashed dishes, laundry. A lot of the dishes still had food in them and were sitting in the sink.
This was the house of a woman who worked too much and never slept. He told me once how he woke her up when he got home. How he came to her side of the bed and tapped her awake with his dick. The rest is so terrible that I won’t repeat it to anyone but Bekah. It is so horrifying that I have told Bekah over and over again over the years. I just keep having to talk about it to try to work my mind around it.
Aunt Breezy got almost no sleep and he went to bed laughing. He was getting so much more cruel that he ever had been before.
“Ball you can’t live like this,” Grandma said.
“Well this is my life,” he said, throwing his arms up and dropping them at his sides.
Back at my house he took the pictures in to show Rose. “How do you live like this? Doesn’t she know how to wash a dish?”
“He could wash them,” I said. They both looked up at me as if I had taken the Lord’s name in vain.
“He shouldn’t have to. She has a cushy job at Walmart, he works in a factory. His work is backbreaking. It is her duty to keep a clean house for him,” Rose said. “He is the man of the house. Ball, is she even cooking for you?”
“Some nights I have to make myself a ham sandwich before bed because I haven’t eaten all day.”
“Sweet Jesus. Honey, come here.” She wrapped her arms around Ball and hugged him. “Did you show Mom?”
“Yeah she knows.”
“Well me and Mom are going to sit her down and remind her of her job. Keeping a house like this, this is disgusting.”
“House smells, too.”
“And those kids have to live in this sty?”
“Yup.” He took the pictures and walked off. He was out the door and I watched through the bay windows as he disappeared from the lot.
He started taking trips up to Milwaukee every other month.
Alone.
When he got back the first time, he reached up to the visor. He pulled out a picture of him at a strip club with his arms around a beautiful blonde topless with huge breasts.
“Don’t think they are real but they will get the job done.”
“What do you mean?”
“This stays here.” He tucked it back in the visor. “She drives this car when she takes the kids to your house so your mom can babysit. It will fall in her lap every time she pulls the visor down. Early mornings, early evenings. The sun will be in her eyes. She will see it.”
I turned my head to look out the window. I couldn’t keep from grinding my teeth.
The next morning when she came to drop off the kids, she looked as if her heart had been ripped out. She wouldn’t talk, she wouldn’t hug me goodbye. She just drove off to work broken.
The next time he went to Milwaukee, he got me in his car and handed me a picture he pulled out of the visor.
“Saw your Aunt Easy,” he said with a grin. “I see her every time I go up there. Best fuck, I mean the best possible fuck in the world.”
Shush screamed in my mind, way back with his mouth sewn shut, I heard him wailing.
I looked at the picture and it was Easy. She was naked, holding her breasts. He had been standing at the foot of the bed when he took the picture, it was obvious. I handed it back to him, my mind shutting down and crumpling.
“No, that one is yours. I got my own.” He pulled another one from the visor. “I keep breaking or hiding her sunglasses.”
I have no idea what I did with that picture, where it ended up. Burned, I hope. Maybe sacrificed at the Bridge, but I don’t think so. I don’t think I would bring something like Easy to Teardrop Road. Scissors maybe. Or maybe I just went out in the back yard with a hand spade and buried it under the grass. I only ever saw it once before folding it in half, stuffing it in my pocket. Thinking on it now, I think probably Assassin destroyed that picture. That’s the best I can hope for.
Grandma and Rose did sit down with Breezy. They screamed and she wept and they commanded her to do better.
They did this every few months. He just kept taking pictures.
Jesse Teller 
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