by Brad Listi
The sun was down. I would be gone in fourteen hours. That would be that. I’d never see her again, in all likelihood. She wasn’t allowed to leave Cuba, and I wouldn’t be going back there anytime soon. There were too many other places to go, places I’d never been before. Places that weren’t forbidden by the U.S. government.
I tried to convince myself that I shouldn’t be too sad. People came, people went. Life was a transient affair. This kind of thing happened all the time. People met. People parted. People smiled. People showered together. People never saw one another again. People made their own separate ways toward The Void. That was life. That was death. That was the way it went. You’d think I would’ve been more used to it by now.
I told myself that it was important to look on the bright side. Pamela and I had had a nice time together. We’d spent almost ninety-six hours together. I’d made a new friend in Cuba. I’d paid her one hundred dollars a day, or roughly four dollars an hour, to hang out with me. Nevertheless, it seemed as though we’d forged some kind of meaningful bond that transcended all financial considerations.
The music rolled to a close. The slow number ended. The dance was over. Pamela looked up at me and smiled. Then she hiccupped lightly and put her head on my shoulder. For the first time since I’d met her, she actually seemed sixteen.
III.
1.
My dad’s mother was named Rita. My sisters and I called her Mimi. At the time she was living in a nursing home, on account of the fact that she had lost her mind.
Alzheimer’s disease n.
A disease marked by the loss of cognitive ability, generally over a period of ten to fifteen years, and associated with the development of abnormal tissues and protein deposits in the cerebral cortex.
My dad’s father was named Frank. My sisters and I called him Pops. He ran a local butcher shop with his brothers for forty years before dying in 1995, of a heart attack. It was his fourth.
myocardial infarction n.
Destruction of heart tissue resulting from obstruction of the blood supply to the heart muscle.
My dad had two younger brothers. First there was Uncle Wally, the dentist. He lived and worked in Morgan City, Louisiana, where he was born and raised. His wife, Katherine, was from Lafayette, and together they had three children: Melissa, Wally Jr., and Mary-Beth.
Then there was my dad’s youngest brother, Uncle Brian. Uncle Brian was mentally disabled. He was thirty-six years old and had the faculties of a third grader.
Uncle Brian had been at home with Mimi the day she’d lost her mind. He was sitting in the living room, watching television, when he heard a noise. He walked into the kitchen and found Mimi collapsed on the cold tile floor. He summoned the neighbors, and the neighbors called 911. An ambulance arrived and took her to the hospital.
According to the doctors, something in her head just snapped.
Apparently, that kind of thing just happens sometimes. Sometimes people’s heads just snap.
dementia n.
1.) Deterioration of intellectual faculties, such as memory, concentration, and judgment, resulting from an organic disease or a disorder of the brain. It is sometimes accompanied by emotional disturbance and personality changes.
2.) Madness; insanity. See synonyms at insanity.
As a result of his mother’s inability to care for him, Uncle Brian now lived in the town of Thibodaux, in a home for mentally disabled people. He worked at a local nursery and watered trees for a living. The nursery gave him plenty of vacation time. Every year he spent three weeks with my uncle Wally and aunt Katherine down the road in Morgan City and three weeks in Indianapolis with my mom and dad.
Getting him from Louisiana to Indiana always presented a certain logistical challenge. Airplanes weren’t an option; flying would have terrified him. Trains were somewhat more agreeable but not advisable over such long distances. Travel by automobile was therefore the only truly practical method of transport.
I had been plotting my next move when I called my parents to let them know I had made it out of Cuba alive and was safe and sound in Cancún. At the time, I was thinking of going to northern India.
“You’re unemployed,” my dad said. “Get your ass to Louisiana, pick up your uncle, and drive him up to Indiana.”
I said, “All right.”
Judging by the tone of his voice, there wasn’t much room for debate.
Under normal circumstances, my dad made the trip, but at that particular time, business obligations had him bound. He had to be in Phoenix that week to attend a business conference. Uncle Wally was in pretty much the same boat. He had his dental practice to attend to, and summer was his high season. The kids would soon be getting out of school, and he was working twelve-hour days, cleaning teeth. He had a backlog of appointments.
With this in mind, the job fell naturally to me. I flew out of Mexico the following morning on a direct flight to New Orleans. My itinerary was completely mapped out. I would be spending a couple of days with Uncle Wally and Aunt Katherine and family in Morgan City, and from there, Uncle Brian and I would set out northward in a rental car, straight up the belly of America on our way to Indianapolis.
2.
Doctors had ascertained that Uncle Brian wasn’t afflicted with Down syndrome or fragile X, the two most common chromosomal causes of mental retardation. As a result, the process of identifying the roots of his condition had always been in large part speculative. It could’ve been genetic. It could’ve been something else.
My family tended to blame his condition on a lack of oxygen at birth. This line of thinking was logical and may very well have been accurate, but there was little substantial proof to back it up. For the most part, it was just the blanket explanation we used as a shorthand way of talking about his misfortune. It provided us with a brief yet satisfactory method of defining it for the sympathetic and curious, while at the same time allowing us to avoid the sad and scary issue of simple dark luck.
People, generally speaking, don’t like to hear about simple dark luck.
The brain requires lots of oxygen in order to function properly.
At the end of the day, there was no clear answer as to why Uncle Brian was how he was. The source of his affliction was a mystery.
Uncle Brian’s physical presence was large. Standing five feet seven inches tall and weighing in at a robust 235 pounds, he was blessed with preternatural strength and uncommon coordination. He was a freakishly good natural athlete, all things considered. He had strong legs, a huge barrel chest, forearms like Popeye’s, the neck of a heavyweight champion, and a head that looked like it was carved from a large block of granite.
He was a particularly good bowler, having won three gold medals in the sport during the preceding five years at the Louisiana Special Olympics. With absolutely no formal training and a technique that would make any traditionalist shudder, he managed to consistently achieve scores in the 150 range, slinging the ball down the lane with incredible force, glaring inattention to detail, and utterly shocking precision.
As Uncle Wally liked to say, “The dadgum sumbitch bowls strikes by accident.”
Also worth noting is the fact that Uncle Brian’s voice was shockingly loud. He had a booming, unaffected baritone that for the most part knew only one volume. The man hollered everything he said. If you asked him how he was doing, for instance, he would invariably shout the following:
“DOIN’ OKAY! DOIN’ ALL RIGHTY!”
It was practically guaranteed.
In addition, he had a habit of repeating everything he heard on the radio and on television.
And sometimes, just for the hell of it, he repeated what people said to him in conversation.
3.
Uncle Brian and I were in Madison, Mississippi, just north of Jackson. At Uncle Brian’s request, we had stopped off for lunch at a local Pizza Hut. Our conversation regarding when and where to eat had taken place in the car a couple of hours earlier. It went like this:
ME:
Uncle Brian, you hungry?
BRIAN: (No response.)
ME: Uncle Brian?
BRIAN: HUH?
ME: I asked you if you’re hungry.
BRIAN: I’M HUNGRY!
ME: Where do you want to stop for lunch?
BRIAN: I WANNA EAT LUNCH, WAYNE!
ME: But where do you want to eat lunch?
BRIAN: UH…
ME: You got a favorite restaurant?
BRIAN: YEAH.
ME: What is it?
BRIAN: I DUNNOW.
ME: Come on. You know. Think of where you like to eat. What’s your favorite place? What’s your favorite food?
BRIAN: PIZZA HUT!
ME: You want to eat at Pizza Hut?
BRIAN: YEAH.
ME: You feel like pizza?
BRIAN: I FEEL LIKE A PIZZA!
ME: Okay then. We’ll find a Pizza Hut.
BRIAN: I WANNA EAT A PIZZA HUT, WAYNE!
ME: We’re gonna stop. Just a few miles.
BRIAN: I LIKE PIZZA HUT!
ME: Okay. We’re on our way.
The Pizza Hut in Madison, Mississippi, had an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet. For the incredible price of $7.99, a human being was allowed to enter the restaurant and eat as much food as he was capable of consuming.
This was dangerous.
Uncle Brian’s passion for food was extraordinary. He had trouble knowing when to stop eating. It was part of his condition. Left unchecked, the man would eat himself to the point of violent gastric upset. I had been reminded of this fact ad nauseam in the forty-eight hours leading up to our departure.
ad nauseam adv.
To a disgusting or ridiculous degree; to the point of nausea.
“Don’t let him overeat,” my dad said.
“Watch him like a hawk,” said Uncle Wally.
“If you’re not careful, he’ll do some serious damage,” my dad said.
“If you let him go, he’ll eat himself right into the hospital,” said Uncle Wally.
“Okay,” I said.
Uncle Brian was on his sixth and final slice, devouring it with remarkable zeal. When he was finished, I would have to perform the unenviable task of cutting him off. I’d have to find a way to get him out of there somehow.
We hadn’t spoken a word since we sat down with our food. Uncle Brian rarely spoke while eating—another rule of thumb with him. Not until his plate was completely clean would he consider engaging in any kind of conversation. He wouldn’t leave even a single crumb on his plate, or even the tiniest puddle of grease. Everything had to go.
There was an infamous story that Uncle Wally liked to tell involving an all-you-can-eat buffet at a Popeyes fried chicken restaurant many years earlier. It was Uncle Brian’s first trip to an all-you-can-eat buffet. The place was packed. Uncle Brian was left to eat at his leisure. He sat there wolfing down fried chicken, biscuits, and gravy for the better part of an hour. He went hog wild. He ate and ate and ate.
Then he turned his head to the left and blew chow all over the floor.
The restaurant cleared out as if it were on fire.
It was my singular mission to prevent all such calamities from reoccurring on my watch.
4.
Road trips reminded me of Amanda. Driving up the interstate, watching the country fly by, I couldn’t help but think of her. The two of us had taken a road trip together over spring break, back when we were dating. We drove out to Vegas, and then we made our way to the Grand Canyon and Sedona. This was right after I’d gotten my Jeep. We drove around the Southwest for ten days. No agenda. It was the best time we ever had. Amanda loved to travel, loved to be on the road. She was good at conversation. Good at silence. She never seemed to get tired. And she always insisted that we stop at mom-and-pop restaurants along the way. It was a thing with her. No franchises. No superstores. Nothing familiar. Everything had to be local. All commercial transactions, save gasoline, had to be conducted in a noncorporate environment. Truck-stop diners. Greasy spoons. Local motels. She felt it made the travel experience more authentic. I always liked that about her.
And if something came up along the way that interested her—no matter what it was—she always made sure that we stopped and checked it out. Time wasn’t an issue. Itineraries meant nothing. Safety was a secondary concern. She was always reading road signs, thumbing through guidebooks, desperate to make sure that we didn’t miss anything. Spontaneity was of critical importance. Landmarks mattered too. She made me stop at the Hoover Dam. She made me drive by a whorehouse. She made me take her out to this enormous crater in the middle of the desert. It took us two hours to get there. We paid twenty dollars each, ascended a mammoth concrete staircase, stood at the lip, and looked down. It was nothing but a giant hole.
I was nonplussed.
Amanda’s enthusiasm, on the other hand, was completely undiminished.
Later in the trip, she made me take her to a ghost town in the wilds of Arizona.
“Come on,” she pleaded. “We have to do it. We have to see it. Please, please, please.”
“Why do you want to see a ghost town? It’s a hundred miles out of our way.”
“Because if we don’t go see it,” she said to me, “how will we know that it’s there?”
5.
Uncle Brian and I were dressed in full caving gear—wading pants, rubber boots, helmets with headlamps, and so forth. I had paid a premium fee for a private, two-hour exploratory trip through undeveloped sections of Marengo Cave.
Approximately 4.6 miles in length, Marengo Cave is the most visited show cave in the state of Indiana. It was first discovered by a fifteen-year-old girl named Blanche Hiestand and her eleven-year-old little brother, Orris, back in 1883. According to lore, Blanche and Orris had hiked up a hillside one afternoon, reaching a grove of trees surrounding a large, mysterious depression. Together they walked down into the mysterious depression, where, to their astonishment, they discovered a gaping hole.
Our guide was a redneck gentleman named Stewart. Stewart was built like a tank. He had a rust-colored handlebar mustache and shoulder-length blond hair. From what I could tell, he spent an enormous amount of his time wandering around in the subterranean darkness. At the outset of our adventure, I asked him if he ever got scared down there.
“Hey, Stewart,” I said. “Do you ever get scared down there?”
“I know this place like the back of my dick,” he said.
Thirty minutes into the tour, everything was copacetic. So far, so good. We were wandering along a path through a dark, narrow corridor. The walls of the cave were dripping with water. Uncle Brian seemed to be enjoying himself. He’d been a little on the quiet side, but that was to be expected. He’d entered a new realm, I told myself, a brand-new environment. It was pure sensory overload. I was introducing him to whole new worlds.
“Uncle Brian,” I said. “How’re you doing, buddy?”
“DOIN’ OKAY! DOIN’ ALL RIGHTY!”
Within twenty minutes, we were down in the bowels of the cave, wading hip-deep through cold water. Stewart had been talking nonstop from the get-go, inundating us with cave history, cave lore, and various other types of general cave information. We’d heard all about stalactites, stalagmites, helictites, flowstone, draperies, cave popcorn, and rimstone dams. It seemed to me that the guy really knew his stuff. His passion for the subject knew no bounds.
“Look up there,” he said, shining his headlamp at the ceiling. “Hot damn.”
I looked up there. The ceiling was covered in something.
“Jesus,” I said. “What?”
“Bats,” said Stewart. “Tons of ’em.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“JESUS!” said Uncle Brian, echoing.
The ceiling was alive with hundreds of tiny bats, all of them hanging upside down. To me they looked like inverted field mice.
“Bats are the only mammals that can truly fly,” Stewart informed us. “Some can glide—take flying foxes, for example—but bats are t
he only ones that flap their wings and really make it happen.”
“They look kind of like inverted field mice,” I said.
“They ain’t field mice,” Stewart said.
“I don’t doubt it,” I said.
“I KNOW THIS PLACE LIKE THE BACK OF MY DICK!” said Uncle Brian.
Stewart laughed. I explained to him that Uncle Brian had a habit of repeating people.
Stewart then made a deft segue into a detailed explanation of how bats use their extraordinary sense of hearing to navigate flight and hunt prey.
“Most mammals use their eyes,” he said. “But bats, they use their ears. Built-in sonar. Technical name is echolocation. Freaky little critters, if you ask me. But smarter than most people might think.”
echolocation n. (in both senses also called echo ranging)
1.) A sensory system in certain animals, such as bats and dolphins, in which usually high-pitched sounds are emitted and their echoes interpreted to determine the direction and distance of objects.
2.) Electronics: A process for determining the location of objects by emitting sound waves and analyzing the waves reflected back to the sender by the object.
Stewart led us out of the water and around a corner. We followed him to a small opening in the side of the cave wall, where he explained that we would be crawling on our bellies, army-style, for a distance of about 150 feet.
“The space ain’t huge,” he said. “But I done it enough times to guarantee you there’s plenty of room to get through. Your friend here’s a big boy, but he shouldn’t have any problems. I seen fellas twice his size make their way just fine.”
