Collected Short Stories: volume IV by Barry Rachin - HTML preview

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Kissing Cousins

 

 

"Your Uncle Ned, the eccentric old coot, has gone back to nature," Mrs. Peters informed her son with a patently malicious giggle. Mrs. Peters absolutely hated the man - hadn't spoken to her brother-in-law since her husband's death, although, properly understood, the bad blood predated the marriage with Uncle Ned never even showing up for his brother's wedding.

Where Uncle Ned was concerned, Mrs. Peters favored one of several strategies: she either ignored her brother-in-law or ridiculed him mercilessly. "I heard the fool bought several acres of farmland off route 123 in Rehoboth. Gonna build a log cabin and live the life of a backwoods recluse… a fifty year-old Paul Bunyan," she tittered. "What a hoot!"

Why Uncle Ned loathed his mother was never explained by either parent. Phillip's father never spoke badly about his brother; it was Mrs. Peters who detested the man with a homicidal vendetta worse than anything a Sicilian Mafioso could dream up.

Phillip met the man only once in thirty years when he showed up for his brother's funeral and that was a thoroughly eerie experience. An identical twin - he resembled the deceased in every way except that he wasn't laying supine, stone cold in a mahogany box waiting to be lowered into a freshly opened grave. Dressed in a dark suit, Uncle Ned stood off by himself near a gnarled birch tree. Wearing a solemn demeanor, he spoke to no one. Before the priest even finished his eulogy, the stocky man wiped his eyes and drifted from the ceremony. No mention was ever made of his presence at the gravesite. On the rare occasions when his name came up in mixed company, Phillip's mother still referred to her estranged brother-in-law as the ‘eccentric old coot’.

 

One morning in late spring, Phillip pulled into a gas station on the Rehoboth line. "Anybody building log cabins in the area?"

The cashier, a kid in his early twenties shook his head. "Naw, no log cabins… just some old crackpot with a camper puttering about in the woods."

"And where might that be?"

"Three miles up on the left. There's a dirt road and a 'No Trespass’ sign nailed to a scraggily maple tree.

Continuing up the windy country road, he located the property. A dilapidated, worm-eaten slab of wood that passed for a mailbox had been jury rigged at a cockeyed angle alongside the gravelly road. Scrawled in red latex paint, the name on the battered box, which had no lid, read Ned Peters. Pulling off the road, Phillip locked the car and continued a good two-hundred feet down a rutted trail to a clearing where an older man was puttering about a muddy foundation. The fellow, who stood about five-eight, was sturdily built with a bushy mop of brown hair shot through with gray, cascading down over his ears. The jaw was wide, forehead broad with a scattering of crow's feet dimpling the eyes. "Hello, Uncle Ned!"

Squinting at the intruder with a menacing scowl, the older man’s leathery features gradually softened. "Oh, hello there, Phillip." He came over and shook his nephew's hand as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

"What are you doing?"

The man wandered back to the rectangular plot. "Getting the foundation ready."

Phillip glanced about the property. There was nothing, just an endless profusion of knotty pines, maple and oak trees. A tangle of poison ivy nestled at the base of a chokeberry tree; the tiny, red-to-black, apple-like fruit had long since fallen away. "Foundation ready for what?"

"Log cabin. Twelve-hundred square feet." His uncle pulled a flat, carpenter's pencil from his pocket and marked one of the twelve-inch boards buttressed in a rectangular, knee-deep trench that ran forty feet and presumably defined the front of the dwelling. On the ground was a collection of threaded rods with nuts and silver washers. "Cement truck is delivering a load later this afternoon. Sure hope they can negotiate that twisty trail."

He moved a short distance away, ran a tape measure along the foundation and methodically scribed another pencil mark. "Sill plate's got to be anchored to the foundation. Before the wet cement cures, I'm gonna sink these quarter-inch, threaded rods into the mix so the outside walls can be bolted down. It's just an added precaution."

Adjusting to the late morning light filtering through the trees, Phillip surveyed the worksite. A rusty camper was parked a few hundred feet off to the left by a small pond, but there were no commercial-grade construction tools - no chain saws, nail guns, staging or even a suitable workbench. "How are you going to mill logs?"

"Structure's prefab. I ordered an A-frame, cabin from a commercial supplier in Bangor. Everything required is being shipped tomorrow afternoon. I just put it together." Phillip blinked and the man standing there in the dirty jeans and plaid, flannel shirt was his father resurrected from the dead. He blinked again and the older man morphed back into crotchety Uncle Ned, the eccentric old coot and his mother's nemesis. "Because the structure isn't overly large, I can get away with twelve-inch diameter logs, which will be more manageable for an old fart like me."

"Of course, there are a number of options for securing the logs at the corners, including the lock-joint, dovetail, and butt and pass method…" Uncle Ned went off on a rather lengthy rant explaining all available options, but Phillip wasn't listening anymore. He was feeling light-headed, out of his element… no longer sure what to think. His mind had scurried off down a rabbit hole straight out of Alice and Wonderland, a cul-de-sac littered with all sorts of emotional excess baggage.

"I teach tenth and eleventh grade science over at the high school." The words emerged in a garbled, disjointed heap, and he was talking much too loud. "We get summers off. I want to do something… help you build your log cabin."

The older man just stood there, perfectly calm and serene. A noisy blue jay flitted among the budding leaves of a slender poplar that leaned precariously close by the clunky trailer. Somewhere in the wooded distance, Phillip could hear a brook or small stream gurgling a bucolic refrain. Uncle Ned rubbed his sunburned neck and smiled mischievously. "I'll have to pay you under the table," he quipped, "and, except for splinters, poison ivy and the ravenous, late-afternoon mosquitoes, there ain't no benefits."

 

 

Later that night at his apartment, the thought occurred to Phillip that his Uncle was nothing like the family pariah, the social grotesque his mother concocted over the years. But why the animosity? Why the disparaging and degrading caricature which didn't even begin to resemble the man laying sections of threaded bolt along the perimeter of his middle-age dream? As he was leaving the Rehoboth woods, Phillip asked, "Building a log cabin in the woods from scratch at your age… why are you doing this?"

His uncle released the locking mechanism on his yellow Stanley, twenty-five foot tape measure and watched the blade snake back into the metal carcass. "When did the thirteen, original colonies come together as a nation?"

Phillip stared at him vaguely. "I don't know… after the British threw in the towel, and the redcoats sailed home to England."

"I'm a history buff… self-taught," Uncle Ned rambled on. “Never enjoyed the luxury of formal, classroom study.”

“An autodidact,” Phillip confirmed.

“Yeah, that fits me to a tee.” “Anyway, the colonists were paranoid as hell at the prospect of being taxed to death by their own kind much as the British had done a decade earlier. It wasn't until the Second Continental Congress that the colonies finally agreed to give up their individual rights and form a nation. Things have gone steadily downhill since then"

“Doesn’t sound like you put too much trust in the government.”

“Tail wags the dog.”

“How’s that?” Phillip remembered a political science class he attended in college where the instructor used the graphic term as a metaphor for fascism.

“Politicians are supposed to served the common folk not feather their own nest.” Directing his words at the clayey earth, Uncle Ned spoke deliberately, with a painstaking manner. "I want to live a more stripped-down existence… simplify things." There was no hint of bitterness or defiance in his voice. The man spoke calmly, almost philosophically and, in that moment Phillip felt an affinity for his estranged uncle that left him shaken if not thoroughly humbled.

 

* * * * *

 

Phillip told nobody about his clandestine meeting. A plumber by trade, Uncle Ned negotiated the worksite on sturdy legs with a comfortable, loping gait. Measuring, marking, double-checking the forms embedded in shallow trenches extending just below the frost line - there was no wasted effort, all his movements methodical and unhurried. Ned Peters said little else the remainder of the time they were together, but Phillip sensed, at some visceral level, that the man was capable of completing anything he put his mind to.

The middle of the following week he went back to the woods. The cement had been poured and a smooth, gray slab defined the foundation of the new structure. Just as Uncle Ned intended, the metal rods, like dutiful sentinels, stood perfectly erect every few feet around the outer perimeter. Several piles of machine-hewn, twelve-inch logs were scattered around the clearing. "Looks like the cat's up the proverbial tree." Philipp came up beside the grizzled man, who was securing the two-by-six sill plates to the foundation with a metal ratchet.

"You come to make fun of an old geezer or do serious work?" his uncle shot back with a challenging grin.

Phillip secured a leather tool belt with an Estwing framing hammer around his waist. "Let's build a log cabin!"

 

From the morning straight through to the early afternoon, they laid floor joists, sixteen-on-center, securing everything in place with eight-penny nails. "Things would go faster if I had a nail gun," Uncle Ned noted, "but nobody's punching a time clock.”

Around ten o'clock they took a coffee break, boiling the water on a small hibachi with a propane fuel tank. "Uncle Ned, why the bad blood between you and my mother?"

“You’d do better speaking to her.”

“Already have… a dozen times and all she does is talk in circles or ridicule you.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“My mother hates you.”

His uncle smiled as though the remark was complimentary. “Feeling’s mutual.” The grizzled man opened a package of sugar cookies and handed several to his nephew. "Your father - may the poor man rest in peace - died ten years ago on the fifth of April. Coroner's report mentioned a blood clot in the brain.” His uncle grew silent and a minute passed before he spoke again. “Medical examiner should have included your mother as primary cause of death, because living with her sent the man to an early grave." He bit into a cookie and washed it down with a swig of scalding black coffee.

Phillip would have offered up a rebuttal, something in his mother's defense, but knew deep down in his heart-of-hearts that every word was true. How many times when he was living at home could he remember his mother mercilessly badgering her husband? Badgering, hectoring, shrilling, wheedling, and threatening – she always got her way. The former Mrs. Peters beat Phillip’s father down and ultimately dispatched him to a premature grave.

"Cause of Death: thrombosis exacerbated by toxic wife syndrome."Uncle Ned stared at the dark liquid ruminatively but refrained from drinking. "I asked your father once… I said, 'Whatever possessed you to marry?' Do you know what he said?"

As if on cue, a throng of crows secreted away in the branches of a hemlock tree began cawing a loud, throaty protest. “He said that it was all a ghoulish joke that came crashing down on him five minutes after the ‘I dos’ and ‘happily ever afters’.”

Uncle Ned tapped his nephew lightly on the forearm. “Ever watch the Nature Channel on cable TV?".

"Yeah, they have some nice wildlife documentaries. Why do you ask?"

"I've seen goddamn feral animals… predatory beasts on the Nature Channel that were more accommodating to their mates than your mother was to my poor brother during their wretched marriage."

"Nice sentiment," Phillip replied.

Uncle Ned tossed the rest of his coffee into the weeds and rose to his feet. "Twenty years, Phillip," the older man was strapping on his tool belt. "I think that about brings us up to speed."

 

What the older man conveniently omitted from his narrative was equally as damning. Six months Eleanor Peters mourned, playing the grieving widow like some heroine in a Greek tragedy. Then without fanfare, Phillip's mother rushed off to a justice of the peace and married a man twenty years her senior who owned a string of butcher shops over on the east side.

What struck Phillip most was Uncle Ned’s utter perfunctory tone. This is what happened. Here, let me tell you how your mother tore my identical twin brother's heart out. In the end, the physical organ was damaged beyond repair, but, early on, it was the ephemeral entity that gave up the ghost and caused the medical train wreck.

"Are you ready to build a log cabin, Phillip?"

"Today's as good a day as any," he replied. There was no more talk of Eleanor Peters, and it was clear that, as long as Phillip scrupulously avoided the topic, his uncle would never mention his sister-in-law again.

They cleared away a mound of brush and grabbed a quick lunch at a sub shop near the center of town around two in the afternoon. By the time the sun began to dip below the trees and the mosquitoes drove them off the property, all the metal joist hangers had been secured in place along with a ten-inch main beam that ran the length of the building. The huge beam had to be shimmed in a few places and checked for level, but it was a very auspicious beginning!

 

 

The next day Phillip visited the woods, his uncle was already bustling about, loosening the forms around the foundation. “More lumber arrived late yesterday.” A huge stack of logs had been arranged in three, neat piles around the worksite. Some were considerably longer than others and, even with an army of helpers, Phillip couldn’t imagine negotiating them into place. Meanwhile, Uncle Ned was arranging a collection of ropes and pulleys on the ground.

“Give me a hand.” The older man had abandoned the chaotic tangle of rigging and was pawing at a short length of wood. Together they lugged it to the right side of the building and positioned it with the notch facing up on the foundation. “One down,” Uncle Ned chirped. “Nine hundred and ninety-nine to go!” When Phillip’s mouth went slack, his uncle slapped him on the back. “A sick joke... nothing more!” They positioned the matching log opposite and then laid the two, smaller pieces on either side that framed the front doorway.

“Here’s where things get interesting,” Uncle Ned noted. The heaviest logs that ran the entire length of the rear wall were lying off to one side. They rolled, pushed and dragged one into position behind the foundation. Uncle Ned draped two pressure-treated poles over either end of the concrete lip. Rolling the unwieldy log over the rigging, he secured the line with a double half-hitch. “Put my truck in low gear and back up slowly. Only now did Phillip notice his uncle’s Ford-F150 parked fifty feet away with the tail end of the rope secured to the bumper. “That truck,” his uncle explained, “is rated with a tow capacity of eleven thousand pounds. These toothpicks should be a piece of cake!”

Phillip climbed into the cab and fired up the engine. Five minutes later the unwieldy log had been dragged up the impromptu, pole ramp and was seated in place with Uncle Ned binding the joints with huge twenty-penny spikes. In this makeshift manner, they raised the walls on all four sides another foot. “One more row,” Uncle Ned announced and we’ll have to take window openings into account.”

“Shouldn’t we break for lunch?” It was already past noontime.

“Food’s being delivered... not to worry.”

Fifteen minutes later a brown Toyota puttered down the trail, and a skinny wraith-like blonde with alabaster skin and dark glasses approached the worksite. "Cousin Phillip?" The odd-looking girl reached up on her toes, kissing his cheek. “I’m Katy.”

“Enough with the smooching!” Uncle Ned barked. “You got the food?”

“Yes, Daddy.” She traipsed back to the car and returned with an armload of bags. Firing up the hibachi, the girl began preparing the meal.

Uncle Ned scared up a couple of folding chairs behind the camper, and they sat watching the blonde girl working over the grille. The sloppy, unassuming kiss caught Phillip totally off guard and even now as he studied the strange creature he didn’t quite know what to make of her. Dressed in cut-off jeans and a plaid blouse, her slim white legs seemed to go on forever. She was cute as hell but certainly not beautiful in the traditional sense. A squat nose perched above lips frozen in a perpetual, adolescent smirk. The skin was flawless, the eyes the palest liquid blue. She strutted about with a clunky, childlike grace.

"Katy,” Uncle Ned noted, “she ain't the brightest bulb in the firmament, but that girl's got a heart of pure-spun gold." He reached out and thumped his nephew on the arm to further drive the point home. "My daughter's got her PhD in horse sense. She's the real deal!"

Katy approached with a paper plate weighed down with potato salad, a cheeseburger and tossed salad. "Here, Cousin Phillip. This should keep you occupied ‘til the hotdogs are done." The girl flashed an angelic smile before retreating back to the smoky grille.

"The other day,” Phillip stabbed at the potato salad, “you mentioned the Second Continental Congress and made it seem like the colonists didn't trust each other any better than the British."

An orangey monarch butterfly emerged from a profusion of flowering weeds and fluttered around the edge of the pond. "Hell, no! The northern colonies had their own commercial interests - whaling, fishing, lumber, which the British needed desperately.” Uncle Ned stopped talking just long enough to savor a bite of his hamburger, washing it down with a splash of soda. “The southern colonies favored tobacco, cotton and the lucrative slave trade, exporting their goods." "They didn't get around to actually ratifying the articles of confederation until March of 1781. Like I said, this country has gone steadily downhill ever since."

He waved a hand distractedly at the mish mash of logs and tools. "In another year, when this cabin will be habitable, I'm gonna buy some chickens, a cow and clear enough land to grow my own vegetables… maybe even some grain crops."

"Now you sound like a survivalist."

"No, just an old-fashioned, bona fide American."

After the food was done, Phillip walked down the pond. The log cabin was coming together nicely, but he couldn’t imagine his uncle using the truck and crude pole ramp to raise the log walls more than another few feet. Because of the sharp incline, any logs hauled beyond that height would be extremely dangerous. Uncle Ned surely understood this and was hiding an ace up his sleeve.

A chain saw fired up and Phillip could hear the two-cycle engine revving. Uncle Ned had mentioned clearing a section for a chicken coop. It was all part of his 'Grand Scheme'. He would acquire several dozen chickens, both for laying and eating, a dairy cow and small tractor. The tractor would allow him to grow enough vegetables for his family’s needs and to sell at the annual Triboro Farmer's Market. Each autumn he would gather and split timber to heat the place with a wood-burning stove. The goal was to sever as many ties that bound him to the cradle-to-grave welfare state. As fatalistic as he was about the country’s future, Uncle Ned was intent on groping his own way, inch-by-solitary-inch, out of the national morass.

Heading back toward the clearing, Phillip stumbled across Katy wielding a McCulloch 18-inch, 40 cc chainsaw. Seeing him, she shut the machine down. "Are you leaving?" Phillip nodded. Draping an arm casually over his shoulder she leaned forward and bussed him on both cheeks then buffed the wetness away with the heel of a hand."Hope you enjoyed the barbecue."

The girl, Phillip learned earlier from his uncle, worked second shift as an LPN at the Pine Haven Nursing Home. "Everything was just fine."

"Two decades is a hell of a long time between visits. Don't be a stranger, Cousin Phillip."

"No, I won't." He wanted to say more but the gawky girl, who had already turned away, pressed the primer bulb on the chainsaw - once, twice, thrice - and the humongous machine fired up with a mind-numbing roar, killing any possibility of further small talk.

 

Over the remainder of the month they erected the walls to a height of one row below the front door sill before Uncle Ned called it quits. "Too dangerous."

"What now?"

"Yesterday, I hired a contractor with a hydraulic crane and a construction crew. He'll finish the last few rows and also raise the roof." He grabbed a bucket of half-inch lag screws. "Got to get the joists ready for the subfloor."

Katy stopped by pretty much every day. In the early afternoons she disappeared into the camper, emerging in white scrubs and a pink smock before heading off to her shift at the nursing home. She continued to kiss, pet and paw Phillip like a younger sibling or lapdog. There was never anything overtly sexual or inappropriate to the girl's dopey antics. In many respects, she was her father's daughter.

"Got a boyfriend?" Phillip asked.

“Now and again," she replied with an insouciant half-smile. They were laying down a half-inch thick subfloor in anticipation of the outer shell being completed and the building finally enclosed. Katy was on her knees pounding anodized nails along a blue chalk line snapped over the parallel joists. Every five seconds she had to pause to push her glasses back up on the bridge of her pudgy nose.

Phillip nodded but had nothing to say. Uncle Ned had been grousing the previous day that his daughter, who had a wild streak, sometimes went off carousing and didn't come home for days. "What about yourself, Cousin Phillip? You spending timed with any of those erotic educators over at the high school?"

“Lately I've sworn of women,... taken a vow of celibacy." Swinging the hammer in a broad arc, he buried the nail almost to the nubby head then set his hammer aside.

They completed a row of finished nails and shifted over to the next sheet of exterior-grade plywood. Katy draped an arm over her cousin's shoulder and pressed her lips up against his ear. "And why is that?"

"Don't want to end up like my old man." Phillip gently tapped a nail into a penciled mark on the plywood. Draping a chalked line over the head of the nail he moved to the middle of the floor and held the powdery string over a parallel mark while Katy lifted vertically and snapped the chalky line.

"What happened to him?"

"Married a shrew who sent him to an early grave," he shot back morosely. There was a brief moment of silence before Katy, in typical fashion, pulled an outrageous prank.

The girl farted. Intentionally. She let loose with an obscenely silly expression of disdain for Phillip's moody digression. "Geez! Lighten up, Cousin Phillip!" Coming up behind him, Katy snaked her arms around his waist, pulling him close. Her breezy playfulness coupled with the vulgar, low-brow shenanigan’s took all the sting out of his gloomy diatribe. Earlier in the week when Phillip was trying to engage her in another serious conversation, the girl jumped on his back, demanding a piggyback ride. Katy was hedonistic, impulse ridden, a scatterbrain with the attention span of a flea, a live-by-the-seat-of-her-pants sprite born to kiss, hug and tease her way through life with never a heartache nor solitary misgiving.

 

 

The weather stayed dry straight through the middle of the following week when wind-driven rain pelted the ground into a muddy mess. Uncle Ned and Phillip drove over to Tony's Pizza for an early lunch.

"Buon giorno, paisano!" the olive skinned man behind the counter looked up when they entered the eatery. "For lunch… whatchawanna eat?"

"And good morning to you," Uncle Ned returned. They placed their orders and settled into a booth near the front of the store.

"And wheresa ya lovely dotta?" Tony asked.

Uncle Ned's expression darkened. "Katy went out bar hopping after work... came home skunk drunk. She's home sleeping it off."

"Marone!" Flexing his wrist, Tony made a tipping gesture with his right hand. "Too mucha da vino,"

"Yeah, too much vino, Jack Daniels, vodka and God knows what else."

Five minutes passed. It was still quite early, and they were the only customers. Behind the counter, the owner was jibber-jabbering with a coworker in a tortuous, guttural tongue that was impossible to pigeonhole. Phillip leaned closer over the table, "What's that weird language?"

"Arabic. Our Italian host, Khalid Mohammed, took the long way here via Southern Lebanon."

In response to Phillips baffled expression, Uncle Ned explained that the owner of Tony’s Pizza emigrated from Lebanon in nineteen eighty-three after the Israeli invasion. The Israeli Defense Force ran Merkava tanks through the tiny hamlet where he lived with jets raining cluster bombs down on the olive and fig trees. The commercial building that housed his falafel business was leveled. "Khalid's Pizza Emporium - that was his first choice, but then someone pointed out the potential liabilities of such a name what with nine-eleven, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Uncle Ned waved good-naturedly at the man behind the counter and Khalid Mohammed - aka Uncle Tony - rewarded him with a toothy grin. In truth, the slim man with the bushy moustache and classic, Mediterranean good looks could have easily passed for Italian, Sicilian or Greek. "The colorful, inflections… that’s just a harmless ruse," "In another half hour when the lunch crowd arrives, he stops talking Arabic in favor of the Italian shtick." Uncle Ned began chuckling as though at some private joke. "It's great for business and really quite funny when you think about it."

An Arab falafel hawker managing an authentic Italian pizzeria When the lunchtime crowd reached its peak, did Khalid launch into an a cappella version of Oh Sole Mio?

Nothing was ever what it seemed to be.

Back outside in the parking lot, the older man kicked at the wet ground with his work boot and rubbed his stubbly chin w