terrypetersen

HUMPTY TIM HAD A GREAT FALL

Caitlin:

Uncle Tim’s hair and beard reminded me of Mom’s homemade spaghetti sauce, thick and red. But he covered it with cottony white to play Santa for our family Christmas party. He already had the belly and plenty of ho ho ho to spare.

Although Great Aunt Frieda, his own mama, said his tummy held more beer than cheer. That’s what made his nose and cheeks match his costume. He admitted he drank too much, occasionally, but he would slow down on his drinking. Really. After the holidays. Of course, seconds later he gulped three tiny glasses of whiskey that smelled so strong I almost coughed.

Then he pulled out a mug from the freezer and poured beer into it. Mom and a lot of the other relatives wondered which holiday he meant. But I adored Uncle Tim. I followed him like the puppy no one in our family had, his hero worshipper. At the age of ten, I was the oldest kid in the family. Well, I had two teenage relatives, but they hardly ever showed up, even at Christmas. My closest younger cousins still wore pull-ups. They played with their new toys in the living room, next to the artificial tree, the kind that’s already decorated and set on the back of a tabletop so nobody can bump into it.

Aunt Frieda got upset if any of the small people spilled juice on her rug or got crumbs on her couch.

So, the babies’ mamas sat on the floor and played with them, just to be safe. The other grownups sat around Great Aunt Frieda’s dining room table, drank coffee, and nibbled on her special oatmeal Christmas cookies. The grownups acted as if they didn’t taste like ground wood mixed with just enough sugar to keep anyone from throwing up. We kids could tell with one look that a starving dog would turn them down.

So, Uncle Tim and I went to the desk in his room to play a nature and geography game we liked. Uncle Tim taught social studies. He told me stories about countries all around the world, and then spread out maps and pictures. He asked me to tell a story, pretend to be traveling along the map, or act something out. It didn’t have to make sense. We had more fun when it didn’t. I got to be good at it, and Uncle Tim smiled when I traced the Great Wall of China with my finger and pretended it turned into marshmallow.

“You could be one of my eighth-grade students.” He cocked his head to one side and ruffled my hair. The compliment made me feel great, but his voice had the slightest slur, not a good sign.“What do you want for Christmas, little girl?” he asked in a fake super-low voice.

“How about bringing Mt. Fuji into my backyard? I could use the climbing practice. Or you could transfer my gym teacher to the Amazon. He said I move like a sick sloth.”

Uncle Tim put down his mug, for a second anyway, and grabbed a crayon out of my property-of-Caitlin, hands-off tin. He kept it on his desk, just for the two of us. “Hmmn, not sure. That’s going to take extra work, and the elves will put up a big fuss, but I’ll see what I can do about it.” He wrote Mt. Fuji in purple on line paper. “But.” He smiled and stroked the fake white of his beard. “I can make sure your gym teacher gets a load of coal in her backyard. Either that or drop off a real sick sloth.”

We laughed so loud Great Aunt Frieda came in and peeked at us with that stop-that-silly-nonsense look. I may be only a kid, but I think Mom nailed it when she said Grandma’s younger sister can take the song out of a canary. “Anything else I can do for you, my dear?” he asked.

“How about transferring the music teacher to Greenland? Or, better, to someplace in the Amazon where they have crocodiles? She told me I had a tin ear, whatever that means. She expects us to be like Schroeder in the Peanuts comics and make great sound come out of a black-and-white drawing.”

Uncle Tim said, “Tin ear is an old-fashioned way of saying you won’t grow up to be a piano tuner, but that teacher gets extra points for rude.” He rolled his eyes and finished the beer in one gulp. “Well, I guess nobody knows why people act the way they do.” He sighed and opened the big Atlas I loved with all the bright colors. “A person is like a map. A map gives you an idea what a country is like: where the mountains and rivers are, the shape of the borders. But the map doesn’t let you see weather, sunsets, wars, the beautiful and the ugly. Do you know what I mean?”

“Kind of. Tell you what I really want, Uncle Tim. No game.”

“What’s that, sugar?”

“I want you to stay awake longer tonight. It scares me when you go to sleep, and then drop over like a book falling off a shelf. I can’t pick you up and put you back like I can a book of nursery rhymes. I mean, I get scared that you are the real Humpty Dumpty, and nobody will ever put you together again.”

Uncle Tim got quiet, and then slammed down his empty mug, almost like he forgot we were having fun. I thought I would have to play with the babies like I had to once Uncle Tim got sleepy.

“Aw, Caitlin, I’m not opening another bottle. No early sleeping tonight.”

And that night, Uncle Tim and I even played ping pong in the basement. Sort of. The men in the family watched sports on television and let us use the table. Uncle Tim and I bounced more balls off the table than over the net. Our game didn’t deserve a score.

***

On the following Tuesday, the phone rang after eleven o’clock at night. Mom answered. I got out of bed and ran into her room to find out who called, but she told me to go back to bed, so I grabbed the kitchen extension and listened. Mom and Aunt Frieda were talking about Uncle Tim. Something bad had happened, something really bad, a car accident. Uncle Tim was in trouble. Big trouble. A mother and her baby had been in the other car. No one got killed. But they had to get stitches. Tim was shook like he never had been in his life. And he faced something called a DUI.

“About time that worthless kid faced up to his responsibilities,” Aunt Frieda said.

“If he’s that shook, maybe he’s ready to change. Join a twelve-step program. Ever think about that? I’m up to helping my cousin. Do it for him? No. But listen, sure. Hey, it’s not like I don’t understand hard times. I’m a widow. Remember? Cancer took my husband. Now Tim is taking the place of the father Caitlin never knew. I owe it to Tim.”

My heart beat so hard I could feel it pound in my throat. Uncle Tim hit somebody’s car. People got hurt. And then, Mom talked about Dad. To Aunt Frieda. I didn’t remember him; he died when I was a toddler. All I knew was a picture Mom had on her dresser that she dusted all the time, even if she didn’t have time to clean the rest of the room.

“That’s not the same thing. I call because I can’t sleep over all this and you talk about yourself.”

Aunt Frieda hung up without saying good bye. Mom told me she heard every breath I took when I was on the other line, but she didn’t give me a hard time about it. She said she understood why I did it. I didn’t feel sure about much, but somehow I had to help Uncle Tim.

Uncle Tim:

Caitlin talked, but I didn’t hear a word she said. I thought about her words on Christmas Day, about Humpty Dumpty, Humpty Tim, lying on the bed, cracked open and scared to get up. Sure, I felt good to be home again, at least temporarily, until the court decided my fate. However, I wanted a drink but wouldn’t dare touch anything. Finally, Caitlin had raised her voice. “You haven’t even looked at this stuff I gave to you yesterday. There is a story here. I didn’t put these pages together just to be cute you know.”

“Okay, of course. You are already cute.”

“Not the point. You know what? A department store dummy doesn’t stare into space as much as you do.” She shook the stapled papers at me. “Catch the plan, Uncle Tim. Please.”

Then she left. I locked the door to my room. It kept Mama out, even if it didn’t protect me from her words blasting through the wood and exploding around the top, bottom, and sides.

“You got what you deserve. You know that. Your father is dead because he couldn’t give up the sauce. Now you . . .you. . . I don’t know what I ever did to deserve this.”

Mama cried, and I was grateful when I heard her moving away, down the hall, into the dark rooms of this large house. She sobbed for herself. My predicament only got in her way, at least that’s the way I saw it. But since nobody poured liquor down my throat, I couldn’t blame anyone but me. Her tears complicated my guilt. I wanted the emptiness of a blackout right then, but at the same time the notion sickened me. I recalled the dizziness that always came sometime before oblivion, the roller coaster ride at warp speed as it left the ground and reality. Then that horrid night replayed through my mind in an infinite loop: Lights flash against dark, wet early evening streets. People pass and stare—at my car smashed into the driver’s side of another. I see that woman’s face when she gets out of her car from the other side as if it is printed in indelible ink behind my eyelids. She looks at her child in her car seat, at the blood flowing from her temples.

She screams, “Caitlin! Caitlin!”Then, after she determines the child is alive, the woman stares at me. She doesn’t need to say anything. Blood is in her hair. That is what I remember; her 911 call remains a blur. I stand there, helpless. The numb in my head fills my muscles and paralyzes them, too. I don’t get a single scratch. Not one. My car looks as messed up as my life promises to be, but my body could be rubber, numb, and bendable as my beard. My soul collapses long before the cops arrive, assess my drunken state, and cuff me.

Why did the baby have to have the same name as my niece? I tried to divert my attention by looking at Caitlin’s pages neatly stapled together. On the top was a sheet with several drawings. My niece can’t be bothered with details. A real learning sponge, but art has never been her forte. She penciled a stick figure here and there with printed words to fill in the empty spaces. I opened the first page to a primitive house drawing labeled: Aunt Frieda’s place.

A staple at the left corner nicked my thumb as I turned to the second page: a newspaper with an apartment for rent circled. This one looks good, added in red block letters, And Mom says she will pay your first month’s rent. One bedroom. Aunt Frieda can stay in the big old house.” I laughed, for the first time since the accident, glad Mama must be far enough away not to hear. Not that I expected her to say anything other than I’m in a heap of trouble, and that the bars I like so much are going to take on a whole different meaning soon.

The next page showed a stick figure family. Caitlin wrote names under the figures. They didn’t make sense. Not right away anyway. A mother, a father, a boy named Daniel, and an infant named Caitlin. I stared at it for a long time before I noticed words crayoned in yellow at the bottom. Turn to the back to find the answer, Uncle Tim. Printed in small block letters, Caitlin wrote: Daniel is in my class. His baby sister’s stitches are healing, and his mother wants the man who hit them to pay for her car and a lot more, too. But she also wants him to get better. Forever. Not go to jail. Daniel doesn’t know you are my uncle. I love you, Caitlin.

I got my Santa hat out of the back of my drawer and pulled it on. A nasty sleet had iced everything in sight. Not that I’d be driving anywhere. My license waited in time-out until who-knows-when. Mama saw me as I opened the door. “Are you crazy?”

“Probably. I’m on my way to move Mt. Fuji to a very special backyard, and I’m considering transferring a music teacher to the Amazon.” Mama didn’t say anything, possibly certain I really had gone mad. The thin white gloss made walking difficult, so I tread over chilled grass instead of pavement as much as possible. I imagined tracing Caitlin’s Wall of China, except it soon became Tim’s obstacle course, transformed into marshmallow—one step, one blessed step at a time.

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