Taking Care Of Business

by Michael Adkins

“Come on now, Jakie, how’d I teach you to a shoot?  I’ll tell you, not like this... shaking like a dog shitting peach pits.  If you want to hit your target, you’ll take your breaths and do this right!”

     I take Uncle Paul’s advice, and I’m not surprised when it works…his advice always works.  I don’t thank him, however.  Ever since he died, he hasn’t been much of a two-way conversationalist.

“Now, when you’re ready to shoot, I want you to remember what I told you:  Squeeze the trigger when you’re exhaling, and between heartbeats.  You’ll be on target every time.”

     “...Exhale... between heartbeats,” I mutter.  My voice bouncing off the damp cement walls of the crawlspace.  Inhale.  Exhale.  Steady pulse.  Exhale slowly.  Wait for that space between beats

               the sharp recoil of the rifle, and the sound of the gun reverberating from the walls of the crawlspace, momentarily disconnects me from the last four hours.

I went to live with Uncle Paul and Aunt Beth when I was five years old.  I remember my mother telling me it was only for a little while, a “temporary thing,” and that as soon as Mommy was well again, she’d come back for me.  She never did.

I was six years old when it finally occurred to me to ask where my mother was.  I remember this so well because it was my birthday, and my Uncle Paul and I had been getting ready to meet Aunt Beth at the local pizza place where I was having my party.  We were a little late getting out because, at that age, I was into “dressing up.”  I was wearing a double-breasted, charcoal grey three piece suit, cordovan wing-tips (I still don’t know where he managed to find kid-sized wingtips), and, as soon as my Uncle finished tying it, a tiny striped tie.  I looked like a cross between Little Lord Fauntleroy and a mob enforcer.

“Is Mommy coming to take me home today?” I asked. 

     Uncle Paul stopped trying to knot my tie and let it hang, crookedly knotted, around his neck (he never was satisfied with the knot unless he did it around his own neck).  He sat in the chair across the table from me.  I remember how funny he looked, washed in the soft yellow and purple glow coming from my aunt’s kitchen curtains, and how the radically shortened tie bobbed on his neck as he swallowed.  The look on his face, however, wasn’t funny at all.  He looked sad, and that scared me.

My Uncle Paul was a giant to me at that age.  He worked with his friend who was a contractor, and, on nights and weekends (or whenever he got the chance) he worked in the garage he owned, building and restoring motorcycles. 

     He was strong, with round hands, and a smile that made his face look like a cracked mountain.

I used to run to him when he got home in the evening, and, every time, he would grab both of my ankles in one big hand and dangle me over something.  I think that was the only way he knew how to deal with a young kid in the house (he and Aunt Beth had no children of their own), but it was enough for me.  He would then carry me through the house under his arm while he poured a cup of coffee with his free hand.  He’d then say, “Somehow, I gotta get this door open... maybe I’ll knock it down with this battering ram I have here,” and then I’d scramble to open the door to the garage before he used me to knock it down.  He’d finally stand me on my feet and take a root-beer out of the tiny refrigerator he kept in his garage, opening it one handed. 

“Now don’t tell your aunt that you drank this or she won’t let you try for more cavities with a second one later.”

My best memories from my childhood involve an upside down house, Uncle Paul’s denim clad legs rustling in my ear, and his big, worn, work-boots sinking deep into the carpet... or A&W root-beers drunk while crouched in front of my uncle, his stained hands guiding the tools he had secured in my childish grip.  Uncle Paul, all coffee, sawdust, gasoline, and sweat...

My worst memory is from that day, my sixth birthday.  Seeing my uncle, looking so different with his hands scrubbed pink and folded on the table in front of him, my child-size tie hanging from his neck, and him, in his own suit and smelling faintly of the cologne that I had doused myself with...

“Uncle Paul, I smell like a French horse, don’t I?”

I began to cry.

Knowing he couldn’t just dangle me upside down, Uncle Paul looked momentarily stricken.  “Let me tell you about your Mom, Jakie,” he began.  “She’s... she’s like that engine I have sitting on the shelf in the garage, you know, that one that you sprayed real good for me with the WD-40.  Do you remember what I said about that engine?”

“It’s a dirty bitch of an engine?” I asked, mucus rattling in my nose.

“No, the other thing I said about it, about how it’s a good engine, but it needs more parts before it’ll run right.  Well that’s how your mom is, she just needs her parts to come in before she’ll run right.  You know how long I’ve been waiting for the parts to be available for that engine?” He didn’t wait for me to answer, even though I knew. “I’ve been waiting seven years, and they’ve still not found the parts, but it’s okay with me, do you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because I set some room aside for that engine when I knew I was going to get it, and me and your Aunt set some room aside for you when we knew you were going to stay with us.  So, if it takes seven years, or seventy years, for your mom to get running right again you can stay here...is that okay with you?”

I wasn’t sure how my Mom was like an engine, but I don’t think Uncle Paul knew how to relate the fact that my mother was a mentally ill drug addict without doing some serious psychological damage.

“It’s okay with me, Uncle Paul.”

“Good, now let’s clean your face, get you in this tie, and go eat some pizza.  I’ll show you how to play skee-ball later at the pizza place.”

After we got ready, he carried me by my ankles to his truck.  I had a great birthday after that.  Things changed over the next fifteen years.  Our neighborhood went from being a working middle class community, to being the buffer zone between the ghetto and the few die-hard crystal chandelier and champagne folks remaining on the hill above us.  There weren’t many of them left up there, most had sold their houses while the market was still decent, and their presence seemed to shrink as the ghetto flourished in our back yards.  My aunt died.  She was in a car accident when she was coming back from visiting my mother in the hospital... last I heard, my mother still hasn’t received her parts.  My uncle took it better than I thought would be possible.  He still worked, and he still smiled some, but, he seemed smaller than he used to be.  I wanted to believe that it was because I had grown, but I’d be lying to myself.

Drugs started showing up in the houses that had recently been vacated by the people that didn’t feel connected to the neighborhood like my aunt and uncle did.  People tolerated it because there was nothing that could be done (the police force had been slowly whittled down over the years by budget cuts and bankruptcy), and as long as things stayed quiet, people tried to ignore it.

     My uncle ignored it until the day he died.  He was jacking up the roof of the Lawson’s sagging shed in their back yard.  Mr. Lawson had died from lung cancer a few years before, and Uncle Paul repaired the place for free like he had to so many other homes in the neighborhood.

“You got to take care of people if you can, Jakie. It doesn’t pay in ways you can see in your bank book, but you’re better off for doing it.”  The houses in our neighborhood were all carbon-copy imitations of each other.  They were built in a time when people sought the comfort of sameness.  In the yard right next to the Lawson’s, in a shed identical to the one my uncle was repairing, a meth lab exploded... one of the biggest ones the fire marshal had ever seen, he said.  It killed my uncle, and the Lawson’s house burnt down as well. By the time the fire department’s single truck finished doing whatever it was doing across town, there was nothing to save.

My uncle was a believer in insurance, and, in his will, I was the sole beneficiary.  I got the house, his stake in the contractor business, and his garage.  I kept the garage going; I’d sat with my uncle six nights a week for fifteen years; I was nearly as good at handling wrenches as he was.

I also received his collection of nearly five hundred firearms.

My first venture into vigilantism came the night of my uncle’s funeral.  Teddy, my uncle’s friend gave me the keys to a room in the garage, (hardly a room really, more of a huge closet) and said, “Your uncle knew your aunt didn’t like guns so much, so he kept most of his collection here.”  He pressed a keyring into my hands, hugged me, and told me to call if I needed anything.

The room was dark, and I rubbed my hand along he wall where I thought a switch should be.  Sure enough, it was there. Uncle Paul had wired this place himself, so, if nothing else, it would be predictably wired.  A row of fluorescent light fixtures mounted on each wall showed the room to be twenty feet long, and eight feet wide.  The walls were painted institutional green (or maybe it was the lighting), but, that was hardly important, they were barely visible behind rack after rack of guns.  I was shocked, but not that shocked.  Uncle Paul’s family was from way out in the sticks, and, like Uncle Paul said, “Living all alone ain’t good for the soul, it can make you crazy.”

I vaguely remember his father, my great-uncle, telling him that Uncle Paul was going to get everything he had when he died. “Them other kids don’t give a shit about me, son.  They don’t come see me when I’m alive, so they won’t get anything from me when I’m dead.” By the looks of this gun collection, everything from hundred year old shotguns, to cold-war relic sniper rifles, Great-Uncle Forrest was as crazy as they came.

My uncle’s duct-tape patched office chair was sitting permanently vacant at his desk, and I wheeled it into what I now thought of as the gun closet.  I closed the door behind me and cried like I hadn’t since I was six years old.  No one was around to knot my tie and hold me upside down, and I could tell it was going to be hard living alone.

I packed a few of the rifles that I remembered firing on the frequent trips out to the country, where my uncle’s family lived.  I threw whatever rounds I thought I might need for them into a plastic Wal-Mart bag I found in my uncle’s desk drawer.  He used them as trash bags because he said it was dumb to spend money on something you could get for free.  I learned a lot from him.

The headlights from my newly inherited truck lit the front of the freshly painted garage door.  I’d painted it last week, when I heard that Uncle Paul was going to do it himself.  I thought it’d be a nice thing to do for the man that had treated me like his own child for all these years.  I felt like crying again, but didn’t.  Seeing those rifles sitting next to me in the cab of the truck had given me an idea.

“It isn’t so hard to see how you’ve turned out the way you have, Jakie,” I hear my uncle say to me after I pulled the trigger.  “Don’t get too ambitious now, you got the one you were shooting for.  That’ll quiet things down in the neighborhood for awhile until you have to go out again.  You did a good job, now get up and ride home.”  I slide the rifle into its case, and jog down the mile or so to the motorcycle that I built for my jaunts around the neighborhood.  It’s flat black, and as quiet as I could manage.  Uncle Paul would be proud.

The ride hoe won’t be too hard to manage, its not like the dealers are going to call the cops, and the few wealthy folks living up here on this hill are behind fences and soundproofed walls. They’ll just think it’s another shooting on the poor side of town, and how they should really get that condo in the gated community across town, if they think anything of it at all.  Maybe some of my parts are missing, like my mother’s, or maybe all this living alone has fucked my head up.  Hearing voices could prove that at least one of the two has happened.  I don’t care though... I’m taking care of my neighborhood, and I think we’re all better off because of it.

END

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