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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
My name is Will Kennedy. I'm smart, but not as smart as my cousin Andy, who took up computers in Boy Scouts and now works in Austin's Silicon Gulch. I've been in trouble with the law, but not like my uncle Jerome, who is currently in jail for assault after catching his wife in bed with his parole officer. I'm considered a bit peculiar in the family, but not as peculiar as my Aunt Dot, who -- though still a Baptist -- believes that in a past life she was the queen of the planet Saturn. (Aunt Dot got into past-life regressions as a weight-loss therapy, and since discovering that she died of famine in eighth-century Ethiopia, she's lost 48 pounds. And kept it off.)
Aunt Dot once told me it was thinking about me that got her interested in the idea of reincarnation. Personally, I have a hard time believing we all live many lives. The dead folks of my acquaintance have a hard enough time getting over just one.
When I was six years old, my Uncle Billy was killed in the K-resin facility of the Philips Petroleum complex. Vaporized, actually, except for the steel soles of his work boots, which he left behind on the factory floor like wet silver footprints. Statistically, this was not surprising. If you're a boy growing up in Deer Park, or Pasadena, or any of the other little suburbs east of Houston, the odds are pretty fair that Refinery Row will get you sooner or later. Before he died, Billy had been a deacon at the Deer Park Church of Christ, where we used to go before Mom got too heavy to fit in her Sunday dresses. Once a month he spelled Missy Pierce in the Sunday-school rotation. As I recall, he took the Journeys of Paul very seriously, and could not abide a spitball.
The explosion came on the first Friday of first grade for me, during Show and Tell. We ran to the classroom windows and watched a black cloud seep into the hazy Texas sky like blood staining a gauze bandage. I didn't know then that Uncle Billy had dissolved into that dark air; I didn't hear about that until almost five o'clock, when the school decided it was safe to let us hurry into waiting cars, breathing through our hands, to be whisked home. My mom still likes to tell how the company and county officials came on TV to tell everyone that the fumes billowing from the plant weren't dangerous, but we citizens might should stay inside for the rest of that 99-degree August day. With all the windows shut. And the air-conditioning off.
Like a lot of kids in Deer Park, I woke up in the middle of that night with a nosebleed. There were bloodstains on my pillow the next night too, and the night after that. "Solvent vapor," said my 12-year-old cousin AJ wisely. Her daddy was a Brown & Root pipe fitter. AJ (short for Julie-Anne) had an abiding interest in industrial pollution, on account of she'd been born with the second and third toes on both her feet stuck together.
The next time I saw Uncle Billy was three weeks later, at the family reunion. This was back when the reunion was still on the Labor Day weekend, in a campground down on the banks of the Little Blanco River. What I remember best about those reunions is the food. The picnic tables were heavy with lemon pound cake and potato salad, brisket and fat quarters of watermelon. That year Uncle Raider's pretty Mexican wife, Juanita, had brought tortilla soup and chile rellenos and cinnamon cookies and jalapeño spread and chicken taquitos, which my dad said was trying too hard, and my mom said you couldn't blame her. I said their oldest boy, Carlos, told me his grandma Braunfeltzer (Raider's mother, this would be) didn't like Juanita on account of she was Catholic. Mom and Dad looked at one another for a spell and then Mom told me to hurry up and fix my plate.
I went for the hot dogs (made special with Hill Country German sausage and slathers of ketchup and chow-chow) and a little bit of slaw, the kind with raisins, and also a fat splotch of banana pudding with Nilla wafers in it. I had just grabbed a handful of Fritos when I bumped into Uncle Billy. He was so cold my sunburned shoulder puckered up with goose bumps, and he was black and white, as if he had come out of an old movie. I had seen plenty of ghosts before, and I knew right away that him being black and white meant he was dead.
Having left his boots on the refinery floor, Uncle Billy stood woefully barefoot, staring at Aunt Dot's famous Ambrosia salad, which was always a favorite on account of she used fresh pineapple instead of Del Monte fruit cocktail, and real cream instead of Cool Whip. Uncle Billy turned to look at me, and I felt guilty, because he was never going to experience the sticky tug of banana pudding against a spoon, or taste the fizzy burn of a cold Coke. I was so guilty, and so glad. So glad it was him dead and not me.
By the time Uncle Billy met his maker at Philips Petroleum, I had learned not to talk about dead people. Even my Mom's mouth pulled down and her eyes got worried every time I mentioned ghosts. Everybody knew I saw them, of course -- this was small-town East Texas, after all -- but I kept my mouth shut with everyone except my cousin AJ.
AJ wasn't like the rest of Deer Park. She wore John Lennon glasses and burned incense in her room and told people she was a witch. When the cousins were over at Uncle Walt and Aunt Patty's house, the grown-ups would hunker down in the heavily upholstered front room to "set for a spell," which meant talking slowly but loudly over the baseball game on the TV. Us kids, meanwhile, would rush outside, ignoring our mothers' warnings about being out in the heat of the day. This was the '70s, and if sunscreen had already been invented, word of it had not come to Texas. It was the business of any self-respecting white kid to burn to the point of peeling over every square inch of exposed skin twice a summer. The best place to peel was at your ear-tops, where sometimes, if you were very careful, you could slough a whole curled layer in one piece, translucent and slightly bendy, like the abandoned shell of a cicada, which we called katydids back then.
