Fred Porter
ENGL 206
Uncle Turd and the Body
My uncle was not a graceful, elegant man. It wasn’t until later in my life, when my mother felt like uncorking a bottle of wine when I was home for Christmas, that she would really tell me how he had been a terror as a young man. He was big and meaty, hairy, with a wicked sense of humor and an utter disdain for rules and idiots. He was proud to have a self-proclaimed heart of goldand would jovially introduce himself to terrified peers andschoolteachers, who then made sure to use lots of hand sanitizer after their handshake. My mother had a big family, but Stewart, her monstrous baby brother, had not been a part of it since leaving home to join a traveling minstrel group coming through Phoenix. Years later, he told me that he had been ‘here and there’ and ‘around’ during my adolescence, but that certain nefarious situations had prompted him to move back to the States.
As for myself, I didn’t know that he existed until my fifth birthday, when he showed up the night beforewith a BB gun and an hour of arguments with my mother as birthday presents. After threatening to call the police, throw him out of the house, or shoot him with the BB gun he had brought, my mother had given up and cleaned the house as loudly as possible, banging drawers and slamming down toilet seats as I sat on my uncle’s lap and listened to his stories about gazelles and zebras and the view from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro and the Pyramids. I was transfixed.
“Uncle Stewart, did you ever see mummies?”
“Just call me Uncle Turd, bud,” he said, popping a bright red strawberry into his mouth at our kitchen table. “I don’t want you calling me Stewart.”
“Why?”
My mother groaned and turned on the radio.
Uncle Turd smiled and casually gave my mother the finger. “I used to be in the service, bud. Delta Force. I got pretty good at what I did, and they’d send me into houses to drive out the enemy. Pretty soon, they’d just yell ‘Flush ‘em out like a turd!’ and the name stuck.”
“Bullshit, Stewart,” my mother growled from across the room, “Roland, go play outside with your brother. Your uncle and I have to talk.”
I left the room just as an argument began again, but from that point on, despite my mother’s best efforts, Uncle Turd became a fairly constant figure in my life.He made himself right at home, plastering the bathroom walls with Penthouse Pets and pinup girls, and he brought his band saw up from his pickup truck so that he could keep up with his carpentry, which my mother made him do in the basement so that wood shavings wouldn’t get everywhere. He gave me and my brother piggyback rides, took us to the fair each fall, and taught us every curse word he knew. When my mother was away, we would run around the house yelling ‘Fuck!’ and ‘Tits!’ at the top of our lungs as Scarface played on TV and boxes of Froot Loops spilled everywhere. Uncle Turd called our house ‘the jungle’ and taught us how to build huts in the living room and bonfires in the tub.
I came home from school crying one day in kindergarten to find that Uncle Turd had gotten home before my mother had. He was sitting in my mother’s easy chair, cigar in mouth, with his feet on my mother’s antique coffee table. A birdhouse was in his hands and he was lovingly scraping away at it. Sawdust caked the floor. He winked at me.
“I promise I’ll clean it up. Just our secret, huh? Before your mom gets her panties in a…”
When he saw that I had been crying, he came over, picked me up, and sat me down next to him on the chair.
“Hey, what’s going on, chief? What’s wrong?”
I sniffled a few times and wiped snot on my sleeve. “There’s a big guy in my class. He hits me at recess and won’t let me sleep during nap time. I hate him.”
My uncle hugged me tighter and kissed me on top of my head. “Bud, I’m sorry,” he said. “That little shit. Wanna get him?”
I nodded and coughed into my uncle’s jacket.
The next day at school, I was on the playground near the swings with some of my friends when I noticed that Big Sammy was coming towards me. I backed away towards the bushes near the perimeter and tried to look small.
Sammy came up to me. “Hey Roland. Come over here.” He had a smile that was much too sinister for a child, and his mouth was riddled with shards of baby teeth that made him look like an orca.
I tried to back away again, and Sammy ran up and hit me. Hard. I fell over and felt the tears spring to my eyes.
Just as Sammy started to laugh, I heard the bushes behind me crack and give way as though a bear was charging through.I turned to see my mighty uncle rise up from the bushes dressed in a flak jacket, his face smeared with mud. He towered over poor Sammy, who looked horrorstruck as his eyes climbed thismeaty tower of grizzled hair that had grown from the bushes like a beanstalk.
“C’MERE BOY!”
My uncle roared like a freight train and picked Sammy straight up from the ground like a sack of corn. Sammy squealed and writhed like a pig and fell. Crying, his overalls torn, the poor boy kicked up a cloud of dust as he dashed to safety. With a balletic flourish Uncle Turd pranced out of the bushes with his hairy dancer’s legs. He straightened his jacket, threw his shaggy head back, and bellowed at the top of his voice:
“NOW YOU GET THE TURD!”
He took off running across the playground, his camo shorts ripped, his bare legs slicked over in mud. All the children watched in horror to see this Yeti of a man chasing their terrified classmate towards the school. I went back to the swings and giggled with my friends as Uncle Turd caught up to Sammy, packed him under his arm squealing and wiggling, and carried him to a park bench. Uncle Turd leaned over with one arm around Sammy and gave him a serious lectureabout manners that ended when a teacher ran down to the playground and forced Uncle Turd to leave. At dinner, my brother and I hugged him and screamed with joy. He laughed and laughed, and even my mother cracked a smile. Sammy never bothered me again.
A year later, however, my mother came home from a business trip early to find Uncle Turd giving my brother Jules a bath in the toilet. We had been living off of Hawaiian Punch for two days after a pipe had burst, and Uncle Turd decided that we needed baths because were, in his words, ‘smelly as a Mongol’s butthole.’ The fight they had then was legendary. My mother screamed for ten minutes straight before Uncle Turd was allowed to get a word in edgewise:
“Aw, c’mon Rita, we were just playing around. Don’t throw a fit. Everyone’s okay, nobody died. Jesus.”
“Yeah, mom,” little Jules piped up, naked, still ankle deep in the toilet. “Uncle Stewart was just playing around. Jesus.” We knew better than to call our uncle by his chosen name around my mother.
She gave Jules a stare of white-hot rage and then turned to my uncle.
“This will never happen again. You’ll always be a goddamn child. Get out of my house.”
And so Uncle Turd was forced to leave for two years, but like a smelly, furry boomerang, we found him one Christmas morning hiding under the tree with a go-kart and hot breakfast sitting on the table. We screamed and jumped and climbed on him and wrestled, while my mother went into her bedroom and yelled into her pillow. She came out with her father’s shotgun, intending to chase him out once and for all, but Uncle Turd saw her come out of the bedroom and pulled her in for a long hug, murmuring sweet somethings into her ear. Anger on her face gave way to shock, which gave way to a stoniness that was broken when my brother and I jumped on top of the both of them, and the whole family ended up on the floor. We found out at breakfast that Uncle Turd had pried the basement window open with a crowbar, taken the batteries out of the fire alarms, and cooked us all breakfast in our sleep. My brother and I fawned over him during the meal, while my mother sat across from us glowering. I still remember that as one of my favorite Christmases.
“Roland, come on in here. I want to meet her.”
Years later,I was fourteen and had brought a girl home from school for the first time in my life. Her name was Michelle and I thought that she was wonderful. She had a great laugh and we shared a taste in Quentin Tarantino movies. When I told her that if she came home with me she’d probably have to meet my Uncle Turd, she giggled at the profanity of his name and said that she liked him already. When we came into my house, I was hoping to sneak her into my bedroom without my uncle seeing her but I heard his meaty voice boom up from the den:
“Roland! Lemme see her. Christ in Heaven, boy, be polite.”
Michelle, all smiles and pretty enthusiasm, came into the den and shrieked to see Uncle Turd butchering a prize pig on a tarp on the floor. He looked up, gave a bright toothy smile, dropped his knife, stood up, groaned like a pirate ship and offered her a rough bloody hand.
“The name’s Stewart, but you can just call me Turd. Hope you like ‘cue, because we’re having a shitload of it tonight.”
Michelle was braver than most, sitting through dinner, but she became a serious vegetarian in the following weeks and didn’t really talk to me afterwards. After she left with an awkward hug goodbye, my uncle clapped me on the back.
“Awwww, hell, she’s a good one, bud! Didn’t eat much pig, but that’s the ladies for you. She’ll have a big ole butt one day too, so that’s nice, huh?Soooo-IEEEEE!”
These sorts of embarrassing situations happened with increasing intensity, until there was a night close to my sixteenth birthday when Uncle Turd left very late without warning. We woke up at three to hear shuffling and banging coming from the small laundry room where he had made a cot in proud defiance to my mother’s tearing it up and bringing it out to the curb every Sunday. My brother Jules and I leaned out of our bedroom, eyes blurred by sleep and confusion, to see the shadow of Uncle Turd, bags in arm, voice purposefully muffled, arguing fiercely with my mother in the small cramped upstairs hallway. We could tell it got more and more heated until he ran downstairs, dropping parcels all the way, as my mother sank to the ground and cried. We went to her and consoled her as we heard his ancient truck roar to life in the driveway. With a blast of exhaust and the bang of a muffler, Uncle Turd hauled ass out of our cul-de-sac andout of our lives.
Time went on. I finished high school and developed a dangerous talent for building birdhouses in wood shop. My brother Jules and I talked about Uncle Turd a lot, but as we got older we nurtured a lot of resentment for him. My mother was much happier with him gone, and it was kind of nice to bring girls back without having to hide them from his steely gaze and love of smoked meats.
And then as I was home from college after my freshman year, I got a phone call at four in the morning. My phone buzzed as I rolled over in bed to answer it. Jules coughed in his sleep and frowned as I heard that familiar friendly voice buzz to life in my ear:
“Hey champ, it’s your uncle. You up? I need your help.”
“Uncle Turd? What are you talking about? Where are you? Is everything all right?”
I heard a quiet ‘dammit’ on the other side of the phone and my uncle forced a friendly tone thatI’ll always associate with a freshly carved pig.
“All good! Listen, I need you to grab some shovels and sneak out with your brother. For fuck’s sake, don’t let your mother see you. Meet me just past Exit 4 on the freeway. Right near the Waffle House. See you soon, chief?”
I wanted to throw the phone at the wall. My brother blinked and fully awoke. “What’s going on, Roland?”
I remembered my mother in the hallway and felt a deep surge of sleepy rage. I was about to hang up when my uncle yelled at me for the very first time in my life.
“GodDAMMIT, boy, I need your help! Get out here! Now!”
Though demeaning it was to be twenty and called ‘boy’ by my uncle, we decided to give this man the benefit of the doubt. We crept out the house and walked across town to find Uncle Turd rooting around in the dark weeds in the woods separating the Waffle House from the interstate. His truck was parked further on up the road, its lights off. We had brought the shovels slung over our shoulders. At the sound of our footsteps, Uncle Turd whirled around and gave us a bright but unsteady smile. He held a flashlight in his quivering hands. His beard had gotten more disheveled over the years, and he had new bags under his eyes. Hunched over in the weeds, hair everywhere, he indeed looked as much like a Yeti as he had covered in leaves and mud in the playground years earlier.
“Morning, boys!”
This man had had my love and adoration for ten years of my young life, but now at 4:30 am those feelings had curdled. “Uncle Turd, what the hell is going on? Why are you here?”
My uncle reached a hand into his flak jacket and unsteadily lit a cigar, which he used to point to the front of his truck. Lying in front of the grille was a body.
Jules shrieked and started crying. Uncle Turd puffed on his cigar and enjoyed a few shallow coughs.
“Hell of a thing, boys. I didn’t see him come out in front of the car. Life sure is funny, huh?”
Stony, shocked silence. My uncle hesitantly cleared his throat and picked up a shovel from my brother’s shoulder.
“Well…uh…let’s start digging, huh?”
He went into the woods and started scraping at the ground. The tinny clinks of metal on stone and earth chipped away at the crushing, chilly darkness. Jules and I stared at the body slumped over in front of the car. He was dead, all right. My uncle had hit a man in the dead of night and wanted us to help him hide the body. Jules bent over and puked all over the median as a truck whizzed past him on the freeway, honking twice. I turned to see Uncle Turd hard at work on a decent-sized hole in the ground.
“Uncle Turd, we have to call the police. Or an ambulance. I don’t even know what you’re doing. Why’d you call us out here? Jesus, you’re not a fucking murderer.”
My uncle stopped digging for a second but didn’t turn around. He shook his head and resumed digging. “We can handle this, Roland. You, Jules, and me. Just like the old days. Solving problems as they arise, right? Us against the world?”
But this wasn’t a bully on my playground. This was a cooling body and my uncle was, for once, doing something I knew that he’d regret. He was all out of ideas.I walked over to Uncle Turd, grabbed his bulky shoulders, and spun him around.
I then saw that my uncle was crying. Tears traveled down the length of his cigar and hissed as they hit the fiery tip.He held me and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and we sank down into the weeds and cried until the police came and pulled us apart.
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Uncle Turd was treated fairly well by the courts. He hadn’t been drinking that night and they determined that with the man’s black clothing, he couldn’t have been seen until it was too late. Standing in the courtroom, dressed in a suit for one of the first times in his life, Uncle Turd took his sentence with stoicism and humility. His beard was neatly trimmed, and he his freshly brushed teeth gleamed with a quiet penance when the judge asked if he understood his sentence. A hundred hours of community service and a hefty fine and he was a free man. It was a better result than could have been expected, and it made our mother soften up as well. She had been satisfied with her brother Stewart finally seeing consequences for his actions, and she promised that he would be welcomed into our home as soon as he had paid his debt to society and thrown out his coonskin hat.
In addition, Uncle Turd made sure that the man he hit had a proper funeral. The man was a drifter, a hitchhiker who had been trying to get across the street to Waffle House for a late night waffle. He had no family to attend his service, nobody to mourn at his grave. So Turd financed the whole thing. He sold his beloved truck and cashed in a few ‘investments’ to make it work. It was simple, but very touching. Uncle Turd attended the tiny funeral with his head held high and a box of cigars and a hanky for comfort during the tearier parts. He squeezed my hand as I stood next to him in the pews. The preacher gave a quick sermon to the half-dozen of us in the church and then we scattered the ashes along the road where the man had been hit. All we knew about him was that he had probably liked Waffle House. It was the best we could do.