names for the splits in a story about my uncle game

That autumn sticks in my memory like mud to a Wellington. Doug was ostensibly keeping an eye on our invalid grandmother, but I figured he was probably glued to the television with the others. My younger siblings, Doug, Shauna, and Artemis, remained at home. Dad crept the Fleetwood at a walking pace. The night in 1977 that my father disappeared, he, Uncle Ned, and I drove north along Midnight Road, searching for Tony Orlando. The LED numerals are counting down to nothing when it occurs to me that I don’t watch the baby on Sundays. I take the formula from the fridge and pop it into the fancy warmer Cassie obtained during a clearance sale. My hands shake and I can’t zap it with the remote fast enough. I’ve watched that scene on a dozen occasions. The Stranger’s whip slithers through the saloon window and garrotes an outlaw. Eyes gummed with sleep, I sit for a few seconds, mesmerized by the stricken faces of the townspeople who are caught between a vicious outlaw gang and a stranger hell-bent on retribution. The love affair with bad boy Clint ended years and years ago, even if I haven’t fully accepted the reality. I am depressed to recognize a cold fact in this instant. I get the impression the scenes are always rolling down there against the screen of my subconscious. all those images are imprinted upon my hindbrain. Doesn’t matter that I’ve missed two rapes, a horsewhipping, Lago painted red and renamed HELL . . . It’s the part where the Stranger finally gets around to exacting righteous vengeance. The last act of High Plains Drifter plays in scratchy 1970s Technicolor. She’s in the bedroom crib, awake and pissed for her bottle.

Except for the shooting and murdering, and my lustful thoughts, but you know.Īround midnight, I wake from a nap on the couch to Vera’s plaintive cry. Kept a poster from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on my bedroom wall. I crushed big time on The Man with No Name and Dirty Harry. During my youth, I utterly revered Eastwood.

The classic stars were my heroes once upon a time-Stewart, Van Cleef, Wayne, and Marvin. She’ll be a tomboy like her gram if I have any influence. “Get you started right,” I say to her as Bronson ventilates Fonda beneath a glaring sun, or when a cowboy rides into the red-and-gold distance as the credits roll. On the nanny evenings, I feed Vera her bottle and watch westerns on cable. Once I realized that my nanny gig was a regular thing, I ordered a crib and inveigled the handsome (and generally drunken, alas) fellow at 213 to set it up in my bedroom. She kept the dumb, virile fisherman who knocked her up as baby-daddy and strictly part time squeeze. Single and working two jobs (hardware cashier by day, graveyard security at the Port of Seward Wednesday and Friday), Cassie avoided the inevitability of divorce by not getting married in the first place. Most folks tuck in for the night by the time Colbert is delivering his monologue.Ĭassie drops off my infant granddaughter, Vera, two or three times a week or whenever she can’t find a sitter.

Moose nibble the rhododendron hedging the yard. I rented a doublewide at the Cottonwood Point Trailer Park near Moose Pass, two miles along the bucolic and winding Seward Highway from Cassie, my youngest daughter.Ī spruce forest crowds the back door. I pawned everything that wouldn’t fit into a van and drove from Ohio back home to Alaska. Husband number three divorced me for my fifty-fourth birthday. Basically the beginning of a long downward slide in my life. The boys upstairs gave me a generous severance check and said to not let the door hit me in the ass on the way out. The feds were suspicious enough to send me to a shrink who knew his business. After college and the first kid, I finagled my way onto the government payroll and volunteered for every missing person, lost climber, downed plane, or wrecked boat scenario. Lucky for him he didn’t suffer through my stint with the Park Service in Alaska. He realized I wasn’t a Samaritan so much as a fetishist. Took the better part of a decade for the light bulb to flash over my hubby’s bald head. A major crash? Forget about it-I’d haunt the site until the cows came home or the cops shooed me away. If we drove past a fender-bender, I had to stop and lend a hand or snap a few pictures, maybe do a walk-around of the scene. Anything from a kid lost in the neighborhood to a countywide search-and-rescue effort, I got involved. Husband number one fondly referred to me as the Good Samaritan.

Names for the splits in a story about my uncle game