I’m going to Nationals this summer, you know, I say. In Chicago. Then the Olympics, obviously. I’m kind of a big deal. I’m going to be the next Margie Goldstein Engle. Even she says I’ve got something special.
That’s ’cause you’re a kid, says Uncle Whack. Everyone talks up kids like they’re special.
I reach my left toe into my stirrup iron and swing myself up and over Nicky’s body. No leg up, no mounting block. I want my fake uncle to know I am strong. In the ring, I warm up quickly: two-point, trot, canter. We move in tight circles. I jump courses without counting my strides. I want speed, not precision. When we fly, I yank on Nicky’s mane, dive forward, ducking; I forget about form.
Uncle Whack is sitting on a lawn chair near the front of the barn. His legs are propped up on a tack box. He’s not even looking at me. He’s looking into his lap, checking his beeper.
I dig my spurs into the sides of Nicky’s body. Go, boy. We build until the two of us are tight and furious as a storm wall. He froths at the mouth and neck; he can read me. We jump and jump and jump and jump until the insides of my legs burn with that feeling I can never seem to put away.
Her name is Lacey, and she’s the kind of girl worth taking home to mom. She’s got small feet and she’s not afraid of anything; she’s like a gypsy the way she moves around from couch to couch. A peach on her that you wouldn’t believe—Lacey. No last name.
This is what Uncle Whack tells me anyway, or maybe some of it is what I’ve gathered about Lacey from the words I clip out and keep from their conversations, things I may have even imagined from their code-talking. I keep the words in a list in my journal below the title, TOTAL FACTS KNOWN ABOUT LACEY, NO LAST NAME.
The thing is, Uncle Whack says, Lacey lives in Tampa.
The thing is, he says, I need to see her.
From the way Uncle Whack speaks to Lacey on our landline, I think she must have broken his heart. I’ve overheard my mom use this voice before, at night, with my father—that desperate, animal breathing between unrelated phrases—Please, Would you?, Stay. On the other end, I hear Lacey’s sighs rattle the receiver in a wet-sounding static. She speaks slowly, Oh, Wendall, Don’t, and that’s about all I hear from her. Uncle Whack counts facts on his fingers, recalling small things they have in common—the show with the lady with the vase on her head; the man at the fair! The way he popped his son?—phrases I can only assume are inside jokes they once shared, years ago.
Lil Kiwi, he says, hanging up the phone. You mind if I call you that?
I guess I don’t mind, I say.
He lights a smoke and scoots his feet up on the couch. His knees tuck in as if he were a little kid, wanting something.
It’s just that I never know what to call you. T Kira, T, TT, Takara. T Kira is kind of a hood-ass name for a prep school Chink, you know that? Uncle Whack pulls this name, Lil Kiwi, from an armband my friend Jenny made me. She cut a ribbed sock straight across in two neat slices to make a stretchy band of fray. She colored it highlighter green, bedazzled a few stones, and scrawled LIL KIWI in the jagged graffiti letters she’s been practicing.
This is your rap name, she’d said. I’m Bana, short for banana, and you’re Lil Kiwi. Together we can be some dope-ass rapping fruit. No more of that Jewey Jennifer shit.
Uncle Whack pulls on his smoke and offers me a fist pump.
I need you to be cool about something, he says. You’re cool though. Aren’t you?
Uncle Whack offers me three promises if I say yes to Tampa. We can go to Busch Gardens and ride as many roller coasters as I want; he’ll buy me the best, fanciest dinner in the world—a real date, me and you, he says; Lacey will take me shopping, and style my hair, and trim my nails, whatever girls do with girls.
I don’t want to do girl things with Lacey. I don’t want to see Lacey’s face, or get to know the inner workings of Lacey, or hear Lacey speak to Uncle Whack in her breathy, papery voice, Oh, Wendall, gripping his hand, or kissing his eyelids, or cupping a flame to his cigarette, You know you shouldn’t smoke, darling! It’s bad for you!
But then there’s this thought, the thought that makes the roof of my mouth tingle, that makes me feel different around Uncle Whack than the way I feel around my dad, or Uncle Kai. What it is—so simple: He will learn to love me. He will learn to love me before he gets to her. Let’s go, I say. I’m cool.
We drive northwest to Tampa in my parents’ Jaguar, with the top up.
The rats will get us more easily this way, I say. They’re scared of the wind.
I don’t play like that, says Uncle Whack. The wind? My hair? No bueno. He slicks back the skunk stripe with more hair gel. He looks extra polished—jeans instead of the basketball shorts, a shave that makes his chin look like a new sponge. He looks so nice it makes the hairs on the back of my neck go wired, and it also repulses me.
When is Lacey going to meet us? I ask.
I don’t know yet, ma, he says. Gotta wait for the beep. He taps his beeper a few times, hooked on his belt loop, to remind me that it’s there. He lights a cigarette with the red snail coil of the car lighter.
Is she really the right girl for you? I ask. For real, for real?
Always has been, he says. Cross my heart and hope to die.
It smells different up in Tampa, on the other side of the state. Swampier, I think. Billboards with goopy fetuses on them dash by. Alien-looking creatures that I want to squeeze in my hands like putty. I have a heartbeat, they read. Do the right thing.
When do we get to go on our date? I ask. It’s getting dark, and the mere fact of evening makes my body buzz with current.
Lacey hasn’t come through yet, he says, so let’s hit up some grub.
Uncle Whack drives us to a freight train, plugged right into the ground.
I used to come here all the time, he says. Choo choo! He pulls his arm like he’s a conductor, but I don’t laugh. He opens the door for me. M’lady.
We sit facing each other in a small booth on the train. White tablecloths. A single rose in a plastic vase. Older couples sit around us in baseball caps—the Dolphins, the Canes, the Heat.
You ever try a steak before? Uncle Whack asks me. Filet mignon? Best of the best?
I don’t think so, I say. Mostly I eat a lot of pigs. And Campbell’s soup. And lobster.
Well, tonight’s the night, he says, clapping his palms and rubbing them together. I got the Mad Man’s cash, and a hot date!
We’ll share a filet, he tells a waitress. Rare.
When the steak comes, I watch Uncle Whack slice it and fork a cube on his tongue. I watch him chew with his mouth open, the way I am always told not to do, with fleshy fibers of red flashing between his teeth. A pool of oily blood shines around the meat, and I slice off a piece of my own. I take it between my teeth, then into my mouth. I suck the juices, bite. The saltiness sticks in my molars as I grind my jaw and slice some more.
This is the best moment of my life, I say, looking at him. I mean it.
After dinner, Uncle Whack pulls us into a Red Roof Inn. The red neon letters look like cartoon daggers. Can we stay somewhere else? I want to know. I don’t think I like it here.
We’re not rolling up to the Ritz, ma, he says. You’re not with mommy and daddy.
There are two beds inside the room. A brown, sticky carpet between them. When I sit on the foot of the bed, I feel the other half of the mattress rise up. The ceiling is covered in a popcorn plaster, and I imagine a chunk of it falling into my mouth in the middle of the night, choking me. I do not want to die in a Red Roof Inn.
Look, a TV, says Uncle Whack. You’re used to those. He flips through the channels—a rainbow of static, a weather report, Nickelodeon, a lion tearing up a zebra. Fun! he says. Make yourself comfortable so you can sleep, okay ma?