“Look, I’m sorry I ran out on you. Back in ‘Nam they shot guys for that.”
He put down the bottle and stared at the floor. Toby plucked another string, the note ringing sharp.
“Donatello, your uncle and I have been talking about the past.”
“The war,” I nodded.
“Yes, but not Vietnam. There are other wars, equally destructive. You understand that, of course. You’ve been in one yourself.”
Uncle Dan leaned against the counter, staring at the empty beer bottle as if he could re-fill it with his eyes.
“I have no patience for religion, you know that, but when Toby talks about God, it makes sense,” Uncle Dan said. “Maybe I’m just getting old. The hell with ‘getting,’ I am old. But after what you said the other night, …I’m having a rough time with it. Toby’s helping me, I don’t know, work through it.”
“God is helping you, along with the fine craftsmen at Fender.” The ex-Priest strummed all six strings, the guitar finally in tune. He closed his eyes, savoring the sound. “Our Father, who rocks in Heaven…”
“I’m not blaming you for anything,” I said. “You didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
“I should have,” he said. “Because I know about those things.” His voice cracked. “I’ve seen it before.”
Toby opened his eyes, reaching across the counter and resting his hand on my uncle’s shoulder. “Go on,” he whispered. Uncle Dan let out a breath.
“Your mother…Kathy …I mean Nancy; after I was drafted, she wrote me letters about what was happening, but I couldn’t do anything. I was halfway around the world, and she would write these letters about how much she needed me.”
He swallowed, looking toward Toby, hoping for permission to stop, but Toby kept nodding, urging him on.
“I showed the letters to my C.O., hoping for a hardship, but he thought it was a scam. They didn’t care—they just wanted their grunts in the field. I’d always suspected something was wrong at home…the way he looked at her …touched her just a little too often in places a father doesn’t touch his daughter once she reaches a certain age. She was so beautiful back then. She wanted to be a model. He took away the locks on the bathroom door, the locks on our bedrooms.” He grabbed a Sam Adams and guzzled it down. “He waited until I was out of the house before he did it.”
My gut tightened. “What are you saying?”
“You know exactly what he means,” Toby said.
“There’s a reason you never met your grandparents,” Uncle Dan said. “When you told me that Amy had been molested, that you were there, asleep…I was right back in ‘Nam reading those letters from my sister. I shouldn’t have run out on you the other night. I get that. But what was it you said earlier, Toby?”
“We can’t always be our better selves.”
He nodded. “After my discharge I came back home…I pulled a knife and told him I would kill him if he ever touched her again. Hardest thing I ever did. There are four dead bodies on my soul, maybe more, one a civilian I’m pretty sure, but that doesn’t touch what it feels like holding a knife against your own father’s throat.”
Toby set down the guitar and patted my uncle’s shoulder.
“After that he stopped, I think, but she’d already started running away, using heroin. And then you came along,” he said. “Toby and I, we argue about it all the time. You know what he calls you? My redemption.”
Uncle Dan took another swig of the beer, his eyes shifting between Toby and me. “This goddamn world …” he mumbled. “I never thought it would happen to you.”
I struggled to take it all in. “It happened to Amy, not me. I just slept, like I always do.”
“This goddamn world …”
Toby picked up the guitar again and started strumming.
“Let’s not talk anymore,” he said. “We’re such crazy word-grabbers, aren’t we? Something happens, and we rush to twist it into language, but often words are the last thing we need. Let’s give this experience a color instead. How about blue? Whatever you’re thinking, gentlemen, stop, and imagine the color blue instead. And let’s pray.”
My uncle and I looked at each other, shifting our feet. We weren’t praying men, yet we’d both wound up at a music shop run by a defrocked priest, and maybe, at that moment, with Toby playing the jumpy chords of the apostle Springsteen’s “It’s Hard to Be A Saint in the City,” the only thing left to do was to let the music do the praying—as we thought about all that had happened to the people that we loved, and about all the different shades and textures found in the color blue.
-16-
When I arrived at the house the next morning Uncle Dan’s truck was gone, but I stopped in anyway, thinking I should …well, I wasn’t sure what I was thinking except that my mother was somewhere inside that house—my obese, one-armed, incest-victim mother—and that any reasonable definition of common decency required an adult son to look after his mother, there being no exclusionary clause for pizza boxes or concrete stoops.
I walked up the driveway and let myself in, my key from twenty years back still turning the lock. I expected quiet, but as I entered, the noise was immediate and unavoidable, the television blaring from my old room, “The Price is Right” at full obnoxious volume: the fake applause, the chanting crowds; the irritating comic patter of the host—everything I hated about game shows maxed out to its high-decibel glory.
Like a five-year-old, I covered my ears and stepped toward the kitchen. On the stove a greasy frying pan sat on the burner, the lingering spirits of bacon and eggs permeating the air, the soiled plates, streaked with yolk, stacked in the sink. I grabbed a sponge and started cleaning.
From the bedroom Nancy shouted at the TV. “Higher!” she cried. “It’s higher!”
I put away the dishes, checked my
