Uncle Pug

When walking, Uncle Pug’s crutches went huff-plat, huff-plat, telling us he was coming. Two loud crutches made up for one dead leg. Tee cut and stapled all his pants at the right knee so his stub didn’t get cold, except in the summertime, when it stuck out the bottom of his shorts like a turtle head.

“What good?” he said, screen door sizzling shut.

“Ain’t nothing,” Tee answered from the kitchen. I didn’t say anything. I stayed out of grown-folks business.

I got off the couch so he could sit. Tee said he hollered when I didn’t get up from the couch because the crutches hurt his armpits like feet walked too long. But Pug fussed like an old lady, that’s just what he did. Whooped like one too -- stung, didn’t really hurt hurt, except when that crutch whapped your forehead.

Like I knew he would, he flipped the TV channels and stopped on the Golden Girls. He only walked up the path to our house to watch TV and eat. Otherwise he stayed in his house out back. But he’d walk that path every day to catch his woman. He loved him some Blanche.

“Ach,” he sucked his teeth. “Get it,” he said when she sashayed.

“Dorothy, sit yo ugly ass down,” he said when Dorothy came on the screen, dismissing her with a flinging of his wrist.

“Mind me of Sophia,” and then he’d say, “not that old Sophia. My Sophia.” And then he’d wait for the air to breathe the questions he teased up. By thirteen, I didn’t care any more. I’d played hide and go get it, let a white girl touch my thing, felt Keisha Frye’s titties at the movie theatre. What’d I care about some old wrinkly broads on the television and a man with no leg? He never talked about the nasty stuff anyway. Bet he never seen a coochie up close. But Raynard dumb tail goaded him every time, making me miss all the jokes.

“Who Sophia? Some white girl?” Raynard, Tee’s man, sipped wide from a Steel Reserve, eyes leaky red.

“Oh, can’t say.” Pug teased, waiting for someone to beg.

And Raynard gave Pug what he wanted. “Aw man, you don’t said something now.”

I sat on the floor leaning against the couch. Pug’s full leg stretched out no further than my thigh. He had the family look -- Tee called him “petite,” raisin-brown with cool Indian hair cut low, but long enough so you can tell it curled up. Pug was old and lived in a shack, but he never left the house without a crisp ironed shirt, one shined shoe, and his hair slicked back.

“Sophia’s legs -- creamy white like drumsticks covered in buttermilk, long and lean, my boy.” Pug smacked his thigh.

“What you say!”

“Don’t get him riled up, Raynard! I ain’t trying to take his old ass to the hospital cause he done caught wood up in here.” Tee yelled laughing.

“Aw Girl, hush up now. Let me tell this boy how a real man does it,” Pug said.

It was the episode where Blanche goes on the date with her gym instructor, a much younger man.

“Sophia was in France. French women love black men.”

Blanche sat at the dinner table, trying hard to connect to the hot young thing across from her.

“Saw me in my uni-form. Can’t no woman resist a Mitchie man in uni-form.”

Blanche laughed, desperate.

“Well, how you get with her Pug? Back then and all? She was white right?” Raynard asked, disbelieving the tall tale.

“This was France, young man. I was a soldier, young man. That’s the only excuse I need. But we hung out in secret clubs. Won’t nobody in there to bother us cause they were all doing the same thing.” Pug’s back straightened, taking a plate from Tee.

Blanche’s young man said she reminds him of his mama, and dignity flees her face. Pug dribbled green collard juice down his crisp plaid collar.

“She was a queen.” He stared at his hands, “We went together. Then I lost my leg. Then I came home,” he said.

“Well damn? Some French white woman…” Raynard looked like he wanted to say more, but Tee shook her head. Let it go.

Blanche rose from the table, purse in hand, chest high, head high, and marched back home to her girls. She wasn’t lonely, never lonely, she had her friends. Thank you for being a friend, she said.

Uncle Pug just had us. No kids, never married, no women except the ones on TV.

One time I went in Pug’s house. His piss-and-shit pot, one of them portable stands from the hospital with a white bucket underneath, had not been changed and Tee told me go down there and put it outside the house. Said when she walked by, she couldn’t breathe right from holding her breath, didn’t want the ghost of that smell getting in her. She made me put on a doctor’s mask because she didn’t want the ghost in me neither. I went in his house while he sat on our couch, watching his Blanche. I held the cold handles out, trying not to look down into the swishing brown mess, praying I didn’t trip on a pulled up sticker-board tile Raynard help put down when the plywood rotted. Made sure all four corners of that stand set solid in the grass behind the shack before footing out there fast. Ripped off my mask once up the path and breathed, breathed, breathed.

That was the stench he took in every day when he left our couch and huff-plat, huff-plat back home in the darkness. Sugar took his leg, you know, not some damn war. But, who was I to tell an old man about lies.


Written by: Tyrese L. Coleman
Photograph by: Garrett Carroll

When Hammers Swing

If you happened to need a detailed map of the Lunder’s backyard and the woods surrounding it, all you would have to do is ask their youngest son, Jeremy. He was meticulous, exploring every iota of land within a quarter-mile radius behind their home. Jeremy was a gypsy when it came to his outside adventures, never playing in one location for more than a few days.

Jeremy’s current obsession was an abandoned set of railroad tracks situated behind his house. To an adult, it looked like an eyesore, because it was where people living in the country came to illegally dump unwanted household appliances. But to Jeremy it was a world of possibilities: shoes that would let him jump like a grasshopper, a flying bicycle, a refrigerator that would teleport him to other planets. The things he imagined himself inventing!

During his first trip, he surveyed the area, bouncing from the rusted-out stove to a refrigerator that sat askew, just like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A few feet over laid a microwave and a window AC unit. There were more treasures littered all over the place, of course. These were merely the highlights of the inventory.

Jeremy didn’t know if it was intentional or not, but these appliances were arranged as though they sat in some sort of invisible kitchen. Was it possible there were people who lived in this area and at night they came out and plugged the appliances into the trees to cook delicious feasts for themselves and their opossum neighbors? The thoughts that crossed Jeremy’s mind!

Today was Jeremy’s third trip to the abandoned railroad tracks. This time he remembered to bring a hammer. He intended to use it to pry apart old railroad ties so he could capture a lizard hiding inside. His success was limited. Even though he was able to wedge the claw of the hammer into one of the many grooves, his little arms weren’t strong enough to pry the old wood apart. He stuck to the low-hanging fruit and split apart the little slivers at the top, but it was useless; that wasn’t where the lizards hung out. And if he did manage to get lucky and spot one, there was no point in chasing after it. The suckers were fast, darting off and juking wildly to the left or right just when Jeremy thought he had one cornered.

Frustrated and growing bored of lizard hunting, Jeremy decided to dissect some of the kitchen appliances. He’d long forgotten his story about the people who lived in the woods and how they might need a working stove or refrigerator later that evening. A hammer in the hand of a little boy will forever trump the needs of invisible strangers.

There wasn’t much damage he could inflict on the stove, other than a few dents and dings on its rusty side panels. It was the same frustrating story for the refrigerator. He managed to work over the microwave a little, but it was stubborn. The window on its door wasn’t glass, but some sort of plastic Jeremy classified as indestructible.

As Jeremy wondered if he should have brought a screwdriver instead of a hammer, he spotted a TV off in the distance. It was the mother lode of discoveries, the kind of score every eight-year-old boy wielding a hammer hopes to find. It had a humongous glass screen, and Jeremy was determined to find out what was on the other side.

He sized up the TV as though it were a boxing opponent and took a swing at the glass. Despite being a direct hit, the hammer bounced off the screen as if it were made of rubber, almost causing Jeremy to drop it. He took another swing and got the same result. After several more swings, a crack appeared, but it was so thin it could almost have been mistaken for a strand of hair. So far, the TV was turning out to be as much of a disappointment as all the other appliances. In Jeremy’s mind, it should have only taken one blow for the entire thing to shatter the way a window does after Jean-Claude Van Damme roundhouses a bad guy through it. Maybe I should have brought Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jeremy sniggered to himself.

After five minutes of working the TV over with the hammer, Jeremy decided to take a break. The tube was close to breaking, but he was sweating and out of breath. After a few moments, an imaginary steam whistle sounded and Jeremy slapped his hands on his thighs, picked up his hammer and stood up. “Alright boys! Back to work!” he said to himself.

With two more swings, Jeremy managed to bust open the TV’s screen. It didn’t shatter and fall as one broken sheet like he’d wanted. The hole he made was only the size of a nickel. The success hadn’t been gratuitous, but it was a success, and he would take it. As he chipped away at the hole, it quickly turned into an opening the size of a coffee can. He gathered all the strength he had and swung as hard as he could. He hoped he would be able to shatter at least one half of the remaining glass, but instead, he completely missed and the hammer plunged right into the hole he’d already made. As it did, the top of his thumb caught on a piece of the jagged glass which gouged out a chunk of his flesh. He was amazed at how little such a wound actually hurt.

At first, the blood slowly worked its way out of the spot the flesh had been only moments prior. It was like a snake sleepily emerging from a hole until it began pouring out and painting his suntanned hand. The sudden appearance of so much blood opened Jeremy’s eyes: the small wound hurt more than anything he had ever experienced before. As he frantically pedaled back home to his mom, somewhere near a TV with a broken screen, laid a hammer forgotten to the rest of the world.

Written by: Michael Williams
Photograph by: Anna Westbury