Abigail has adopted a little Callie!
I wrote a bunch on this last night. Here’s the first half or so. Yep, it’s completely fictional.
My Uncle Vince escaped from prison in 1968. I wasn’t born until 1970, so he was already a legend by the time I learned to both fear and revere him. I was thirteen, in the hot, horrible, desolate summer of Mobile, Alabama. No one had heard from or seen Vince since May of 75. My mother, who always called her brother Vinnie, said: “We’re well shut of that one. Vinnie won’t never come back. And he oughta not!” She was emphatic but vague about the reasons why.
I got the real story from Uncle Terry, down at his auto shop. I tried to spend as much of the summer there as I could. Momma didn’t know where I was and didn’t care. She was ancient throughout my childhood; in her 40s and old for her age on top of it. She walked slowly. It didn’t annoy me, it just made me afraid. I ran everywhere I was going – why not get there faster? I’d dash down the alley and round the corner, early enough that it wasn’t yet full sun, and take refuge with Uncle Terry under the hood of a K-car in for engine work. And Uncle Terry would talk – about almost anything, if I asked right. When it came to Uncle Vince, he was happy to elaborate.
“Vince got himself in trouble early on. He was only your age when he started stealing parts from the salvage yards and fixing up his friends’ cars. The yards got wise, put up more wire, got more dogs. It didn’t stop him. Pretty soon he moved on to whole cars – they went with the parts, and Vince, well, he never had trouble finding a buyer for them cars. It wasn’t the cars that got old Vince in the end, though. He got a half a cinder block and put it through your momma’s window one night. He was drunker’n a skunk and just as mean. Yep, your momma, she didn’t fool around, called the po-lice, left him out there baying at the moon. He never believed she’d do it, of course. She’d been telling him for years she’d get him arrested, he did something like that just one more time.
“Well, they picked him up, throwed him in the drunk tank, and some bored deputy pulled his record. That deputy made sergeant, by GoD, because just a month ago an old buddy of Vince’s had rolled on him. Told the cops everything they wanted to know – about a barfight, that is. Turns out Vince wasn’t even in it – he was too smart to fight, anyway. Turns out, too, the truth don’t matter much to them boys in blue. They had the other fella’s sworn word it was Vince who killed a man – so it was off to the clink with him just like that. He had no alibi, see, since every night he was running cars or working the chop shop with plenty of stolen parts. And Vince, he had a weird notion of honor. Wouldn’t let him bargain his way out of years behind bars – but it would let him terrorize the living daylights outta your momma. Mm-hmm. Honor,” said Uncle Terry.
I was astounded. I’d never heard this part of the story before. “Uncle Vince,” I asked, “what’d he want to get at Momma for? I mean, what’d she do to him?” But Uncle Terry was done on the subject. “Mm-hmm,” he said again, leaning all the way down under the hood. “Honor,” he muttered, scoffing. “Honor.”
Naturally, I did what any teenage sleuth would do. I asked about it at my first opportunity: “Momma, what’s the quarrel tween you and Uncle Vince?” “Alberta!” my mother hollered, dropping her fork. She got her voice back under control: “You help your brother eat his peas.” Jimmie was seven, and needed no help. When I took his spoon, he wailed like a weather-horn. I decided, spooning up some peas and hushing Jimmie, I ought to take a different tack.
I gave it a few days. Without knowing why, I sensed it would be best. Then one morning, I skipped my usual run to Terry’s garage and waited till Momma was out back hanging laundry, her mouth full of clothespins. I strolled out the back door, on the pretense of helping her. I stuck a few pins in my teeth and grabbed a sheet. “So … Momma,” I said from behind it, “you remember the night Uncle Vince got arrested?” She hesitated a long moment, and I thought for sure I was going to get my name thrown back at me again. Then she said: “Hmph. Sure do. Was me what called, you know.”
