My Uncle Brown, he was the white boy who married my grandmother’s sister—another one of those Spaniards with light skin and eyes like goddamn jewels. A beautiful woman. He married her when Huntington Park was still a white man’s town, a place where people like the Mormon prophet used to live. A clean, safe, suburban utopia built on the simple foundation of everyone looking the same. Of course, that didn’t last. The world rarely does.
I don’t know the whole story, but somewhere in the mess of my own family’s divorce, they took in my mom for a while, and then my aunt. That kind of charity always comes with a price, and I guess it caused some kind of mental anguish in my mom. Maybe that’s where the seed of her own particular brand of crazy was planted, or maybe it was there all along.
Eventually, my grandmother’s sister got sick and passed away, leaving Uncle Brown alone in that big house. A white man, a gringo, who didn’t speak a lick of Spanish, suddenly lost without his beautiful wife. It was one of those old-school dependencies you don’t see much anymore. He was retired from the Coast Guard, had a boat parked on the side of the house that the neighborhood crackheads were already starting to pick apart, and a ham radio station in the back room with a hundred-foot antenna that made the hair on your arms stand up when you got too close.
So, my grandmother Bertha stepped in. Unbeknownst to me at the time, she took on her sister’s role, minus the sex. It was a practical arrangement. She’d clean the house, make dinner, make breakfast, do the dishes, tend to the place. In return, Uncle Brown would pay for all the food. My grandfather was just a sidekick in this new operation, sleeping in the master bedroom by himself in that three-bedroom house.
Then my uncle, like all the heroes in my young life, started to get sick. A gurgling in his throat that never went away. Lung cancer. I remember seeing that once-strong man, reduced to a skeleton, propped up in a little twin bed with a Catholic cross hanging over him, a rosary tangled in his bony fingers, sucking at the air with such a terrible, gasping effort.
And me? I was a goddamn ghoul.
On one particular day, while he was dying in that bed, I slid underneath it. I knew he wasn’t coming back from this one. I went into his closet, and there, hidden away, was his stash. Cans of rice pudding. Small cans, a little bigger than a silver dollar. He had plastic spoons hidden in there with them. I’d sit in that dark closet, the air thick with the smell of mothballs, and I’d just eat. Crack open one of those suckers and shovel it in. Oh my God, it was divine. You couldn’t do more than one or two, because you were still scared of getting caught. The poor bastard was dying for a long time. I wasn’t about to eat all of them at once.
Yeah, a complete asshole kid. While I was scouting through his things for the pudding, I found a BB gun. A Craftsman. I saw it, but I didn’t take it. Not then.
Later, I was out in the garage. My grandfather had these huge bins of aluminum cans he’d collected. I was supposed to be crushing them. I got bored, started messing with a water hose, making a puddle on the concrete floor. The ground got wetter and wetter, and then, out of nowhere, a gopher or a big rat popped out of a hole. It totally spooked me. I saw it run towards a crack under the garage door and disappear.
It was real. A pest. An intruder. My grandmother came out, asked what all the commotion was. I mumbled something, then went to my uncle’s room. He was still in his dying bed, his breathing heavy now, that gurgling sound of all the juices that lung cancer has to offer.
I went right by him, quiet as I could. Went into the closet. Right next to the rice pudding was the box for the BB gun. Craftsman. I grabbed it and a box of little pellets. I climbed back out from under the dying man, slipped out the door, and went to the garage. I followed the wet footprints on the floor. They went by the garage sink, right behind the pile of cans I was supposed to be crushing.
And there he was. Half an imp, all yellow teeth and twitching nose. A rat.
I pointed that old Craftsman BB gun, pumped it five or six times, took aim, and shot the little bastard right in the back of the neck.
When it was all done, I couldn’t figure out how to get the gun back to its hiding place. The house was full of people now, my mom, my aunt, all visiting a dying Uncle Brown. I stashed the gun in a sewing basket near the side door, figuring I’d move it later.
And during that time, guess what? My grandmother finds it. And all hell breaks loose.
She was right, of course. She could have called me a thief, a liar. But for this one, I tried to position myself as a hero. An honorary bad male, protecting the grounds from vermin.
That bullshit, of course, didn’t fly with my grandmother. Not for a second.
So I tell that story, the one about Uncle Brown, the pudding, and the rat. And of course, everyone has their take. They put on their judge’s robes. They analyze my every move—crawling under the dying man’s bed, the evidence of the empty rice pudding cans, my “big kill” in the garage, how I tracked it. They trace my grimy little path and dissect everything. And when they’re done, the verdict is always the same. A shake of the head. A disappointed sigh.
“How could you, Jimmy? Really?”
Overall, nobody’s ever impressed with my eleven-year-old’s story.
But here’s the thing they don’t get, the part they can’t see from their clean, comfortable lives. My Uncle Brown? Out of all of them, I know he would have appreciated the goddamn adventure of it all.
You have to understand, this was my first death. Not some story in a book. I was watching one of my heroes decompose, right in front of my eyes. The cancer was eating him alive from the inside out. The smells… Christ, the smells his body created, every orifice releasing its toxins, the sweet, rotten scent of decay that hangs in a room and never leaves. His eyes sunk back into his skull, his cheeks pulled so tight against his face you could count the teeth right through his skin. That’s a hell of a thing for a kid to watch.
So yeah, I crawled under his bed and I ate his pudding. He wasn’t eating it anymore, was he? Life, even when it’s being a dirty little bastard, is for the living. And the rat? In a house where everything was falling apart, where the strongest man I knew was turning to dust and gasping for air, that rat was the one thing I could fix. The one thing I could put a final, decisive end to.
I think Uncle Brown, in whatever part of his brain was still working, would have understood that. Maybe even offered a grim, gurgling little chuckle. A final tip of the hat from one survivor to another.
Author’s Note:
You lay out that story and the family, the jury, they see a simple crime. A little ghoul stealing rice pudding from a dying man, then playing hero with a BB gun. They see the facts, but they miss the whole goddamn point. They always do.
My thoughts are this: that story isn’t about being a good kid or a bad kid. It’s about what a person becomes when they’re trapped in a house that smells like death.
First, the rice pudding. It’s a selfish, animal act. And it’s perfect. In a house overwhelmed by the sweet, rotten scent of cancer, you found something sweet just for you. Something for the living. You were surrounded by decay, so you took a small, grubby bite of life because, goddammit, you were still hungry. There’s no high-minded morality to it; it’s the gut instinct of a survivor who’s learned to take what he can get, when he can get it.
Then there’s the rat. You tried to sell it as you being the “man of the house,” the protector. And maybe there’s a sliver of truth in that bullshit. But it’s more. In a house where you were completely, utterly powerless against the real enemy—the cancer, the slow decay, Death itself—that rat was the one thing you could fight. It was the one ugly thing you could point a gun at and destroy. It was a transfer of rage. You couldn’t kill the disease eating your uncle, so you killed the vermin eating the scraps in the garage. It was your own small, violent, pathetic war against helplessness.
And the family? Of course they didn’t get it. People like that live in a world of casseroles and get-well-soon cards. They don’t speak the language of the gutter, the desperate logic of a cornered animal. They see your actions, but they don’t see the goddamn context: a hero turning to dust in the next room.
You’re right about one thing, though. Uncle Brown probably would have understood. A man who’s dying, who’s been through his own wars, knows that life isn’t clean. He would have seen the hungry kid stealing the pudding and the young wolf killing the rat and known they were the same goddamn person, just trying to survive the only way he knew how.
So that’s what I think. The story is about the two beasts that live inside a boy surrounded by death: the selfish one who steals to live, and the noble one who kills to protect. And maybe, just maybe, they’re the same damn beast after all.
