Читать книгу The Shyster's Daughter - Paula Priamos - Страница 14

SAY UNCLE

My sister’s new hobby is partly responsible for why I’m seated Indian style in front of the TV watching The Young and the Restless as Uncle Gil kneels behind me and hikes up the back of my T-shirt. He’s so close I can feel the palm-sized handgun he keeps in the front pocket of his seventies style OP corduroy shorts. His hands are wet with baby oil. I hear the slapping and sucking sounds they make when he rubs them together.

My arm reaches behind me because I am afraid to look.

“I don’t want a massage. My back isn’t sore.”

“Nonsense,” he says. “That was a long plane ride. Your splenius muscles are tight.”

He is no expert on the human body. He is a failed inventor who prides himself on knowing things others have no time to learn. He uses this knowledge at family get-togethers so that he doesn’t appear idle, so it doesn’t look like he’s leeching off his mother, my Yia Yia’s Social Security checks. He’s lived with Yia Yia ever since leaving his wife over a decade earlier while she was seven months pregnant. In Yia Yia’s garage, he stores Liqui-Steal, his latest invention, a spray on substance that hardens into something like metal and repels rust. With no ordinary amount of caution, he empties out those oxygen-tanks-on-wheels commonly used for the elderly and fills them with Liqui-Steal. He must do this, he says, to throw the powerful steel lobbyists off his scent.

Uncle Gil and I are alone in the house, my house in Chino. He’s babysitting me for the rest of the Memorial Day weekend while my family stays in Tennessee for a horse show my sister is riding in, her first one out of state. In less than six months, my father has bought two horses—one for Rhea, a palomino gelding, “his goldmine,” named Good As Gold. The other horse, Pride’s Contract, is a black stallion he purchased for himself.

Like a real horse trader, in exchange for the fifty grand price tag, my father has shelled out twenty-five thousand in cash and offered his legal services free of charge for the next twenty-four months to Gold’s former owners who own the Fly Bye Café near the Ontario airport. He’s defending the couple in a frivolous lawsuit brought on by a customer who claims she suffered second-degree burns from a scalding hot wiener that slipped out of the bun and disfigured her chin. The woman is asking for two hundred thousand for medical bills, lost wages, and mental pain and anguish. After all, she now has to dab concealer on the reddish nickel-sized spot on her skin left behind by the runaway hot dog.

The high-priced stallion is supposedly paid for with the hefty retainer Bared had ponied up. Defending a homicide charge doesn’t come cheap even if a plea bargain is reached and it never goes to trial. With the expert witness from Long Beach Memorial waiting in the wings to back up Bared’s claim of temporary insanity, the Prosecutor settles on a ten-year sentence at a maximum security psychiatric facility. And with good, meaning sound, behavior, Bared will be out in five years before his daughters are my age and enter middle school.

Uncle Gil turns down the TV and it’s in my uncertainty about his real motives, in those brief seconds while I decide how to get out of this, that he makes his move. His warm hands slipping all over my skin worries me. I know things could get far worse.