When I mentioned Uncle Theo, the cop who sits in the front pulled out a big folder filled with stuff on me in it, I guess, because he started looking through it really hard and really fast. When I finished talking about how I met Monica, he turned around and he looked at me and he said something like, “Who the heck is Uncle Theo?” or something like that. He said it kind of stupidly.

I just said I wasn’t going to talk to him. I figured that wherever they’re going to take me, I got to talk to more people like that.

So I told him the truth and I said, “I ain’t going to talk to nobody about nothing unless you guys keep driving me around and showing me more parts of the Bay Area, because I don’t get to drive around very much. Except when I’m going to school on the bus.” Truth is that before I moved down here I thought the Bay Area was where they kept brown horses. At first I thought maybe there was an Appaloosa Area and maybe a Roan Area too. Don’t laugh. I just didn’t travel much out of central Idaho when I was a little kid. I never even saw an ocean until this year.

So then I said, “I’ll make a deal with you, you fat ugly cop and you feller in the black jacket. Here’s the deal: I’ll keep talking in the little Sony recorder here that I got at the electronics boutique, and I’ll keep talking and telling the things that happened to me and the things you probably ought to want to know about, but you got to keep driving.”

I could tell the fat ugly cop who should’ve shaved by now didn’t like the idea because he liked to be in charge. But the bureaucratic looking feller, he got a greedy look on his face and I think he kind of liked that idea of scooping everybody else on it. I think he wants to show up with all the answers.

It’s probably making him mad that I’m saying so, though.

Well anyway, I probably shouldn’t say much more about them or else they’re just going to give up on the deal, so I’ll just say that I don’t like them very much and I’ll let it go at that.

And now I should talk a little bit about Uncle Theo, because I told them I’d tell them something, and it seems to be the thing they kind of latched on to.

First thing you ought to know about Uncle Theo is that there are two kinds of drunks. There’s the kind of drunk that you always see on TV. You know the fellers who sit down with their buddies and have a six pack and then they go and talk about their wives or their girlfriends or they just kind of, you know, have a good time and laugh and smile and maybe cry on each others shoulders and everybody thinks it’s really nice. And they smile a lot and laugh and laugh and laugh.

But not like Monica laughed. Really friendly laugh.

There’s that kind of drunk, but Uncle Theo wasn’t that kind of drunk. He was the other kind, if you know what I mean. Well, I don’t really know if you know what I mean because sometimes I say things that people don’t seem to understand. I think it’s because of my accent.

So I’ll tell you about the other kind of drunk. Uncle Theo would wake up in the morning and he had this funny habit. He’d make this pancake for me in the morning and then he did the funniest thing. He’d butter his pancake really good. I mean there might be a half inch of it caked on in places. Then he’d pour some of his whiskey on it for syrup, and he poured a little drop of it on mine too. I’d smear it around on top of the butter.

When I found out that most folks don’t do that, I asked him why he always did it. He said it gave them some flavor, but I don’t know. I guess it did, because I finally had pancakes without that drop, and it did make it taste different. Kind of gross. But the ones with the little drop of Jim Beam, they were ok.

He always put more than a little drop on his pancakes. After he buttered them up, he’d pour it all over, letting it spill on to the plate in a little pool. When he finished eating every bite, he’d tip his plate up to his mouth and he’d slurp on down the rest of it. Then he’d burp and say, “That’s not a bad start.”

I asked him once how come he didn’t put more than a little drop on mine. He looked at me in kind of a suspicious way, and said he didn’t want to share it much. Uncle Theo didn’t have a whole lot of money, which is the reason why I probably had to leave. Well, that ain’t the reason why I had to leave him, but I guess that’s what I always told people.

We woke up one morning and it was all foggy out, and he decided that he was going to go out and take me and do some pheasant hunting. He was tired of having me in the trailer, and I was always whining when he came back with a couple of dead pheasants. “How come you don’t let me come and go shoot some pheasants with you?”

At that time, I didn’t have Roger. He had a dog named Juice. I asked him why his name was Juice and he said, “I don’t know. It’s just Juice. He’s got a little juice in him too.” I don’t know what he meant. I guess it had to do with the whiskey.

Me and Juice and Uncle Theo, we went out to go and shoot a pheasant. But I think we were going to go shoot a pheasant on a place where we weren’t supposed to shoot pheasants, because he told me I had to be real quiet and sneaky. I had to climb through this barbed wire fence with a big “NO TRESPASSING OR HUNTING” sign on it, and it scratched me up some. The fence, that is, not the sign.

Once we got out in the field, it was a big corn field, he told me to walk about fifty yards away into the field. I wasn’t very good with distances because I was pretty young, so I started just walking and walking and walking. Pretty soon I lost sight of him and I couldn’t hear him anymore through all the tall stalks of corn, so I figured it was probably fifty yards.

I walked out there for a long time by myself.  At first, Juice was coming over to me sometimes, sniffing the ground and stuff. Then he stopped, and I realized maybe I’d walked too far over, and maybe fifty yards wasn’t what I thought.

So I was walking along and I finally saw me a pheasant. I don’t know if you’ve seen pheasants before. Probably not, you stupid cops in your office desks and black coats and spectacles.

But if you seen a pheasant that’s not stuck up on some wall or some magazine, they’re really, really–the boy pheasants are, the girl pheasants are boring. The boy pheasants got really big green heads with a white ring around their neck. That’s why they call them ringnecks, although Uncle Theo always called them cocksuckers.

Well I saw one of them, heh, I saw one of them cocksuckers right in front of me with his big old green head and his orange feathers. He looked at me and I looked at him, and I started swearing at him just like Uncle Theo did.

I yelled, “Come back here you cocksucker!” And I started crashing after that pheasant and he went scrambling off ahead of me through the tall, dry cornrows. He was running off to the left towards where Uncle Theo probably was. I was pretty happy about that.

And I’ll be damned if that Cocksucker didn’t stop and he’d stare at me. Most pheasants don’t do that–they’re smart enough to keep on running. If you see a pheasant once on the ground, you probably ain’t going to see them again. Particularly if you don’t got a dog with you and you don’t got a little tight spot that you can chase them to. This was a big old corn field.

For some reason he kept dodging through the stalks and suddenly stopping to wait for me. I could sometimes just see his long tail wagging and stuff. He was teasing me, and I was laughing the whole time, because I thought it was funny that he seemed to be waiting for me. I ran and ran after that pheasant, and I started blowing really hard, laughing and blowing and yelling “COCKSUCKER! COCKSUCKER!” at the top of my voice when I could get a breath.

I could hear off in the distance that old Juice was starting to laugh too. I could hear him barking because he could hear me coming and he knew something was up. Then I could hear that Uncle Theo was hissing at Juice to pipe down, because the thing about driving a pheasant is that you got to be quiet if somebody is pushing one towards you. You want to keep quiet, because if they get wise they won’t come to you.

I was chasing after Cocksucker, and it seemed like for a long time. I started thinking about how Cocksucker wasn’t just something I was chasing, but kind of like a, I don’t know. I saw a dog race once on TV. There was a greyhound that was chasing after a little white rabbit that wasn’t really a rabbit. I always wondered what would happen if they really caught one. I always thought that greyhounds are nice dogs. I saw one once and he seemed real friendly like. Really nice and calm, but he was an old one. I think that if the greyhound ever did catch the rabbit, it’d kind of just want to sit next to it some. Maybe not kill it so much. Course, he might have. But, I don’t know. I like to think that maybe they’d be friends.

And after a while of running after Cocksucker, I was yelling at him not like I was wanting to kill him or nothing. I just wanted to have friends with him, you know? I know it sounds kind of dumb because I’ve seen lots of pheasants before that Uncle Theo would bring back. And I’ve probably killed a thing or two in my time, too, like you know I have. Poor old Monica, for instance.

But I don’t like seeing things die so much unless they really have to, like Monica did.

As I got thinking about this more and more, I got even more sure I didn’t want to hurt that Cocksucker. I started yelling “COCKSUCKER!” but more angry like. I was scared that I was chasing old Cocksucker right to Uncle Theo.

At first that’s what I wanted to do, but then I thought, “Well, shoot, if I chase him to Uncle Theo then Uncle Theo is just going to kill Cocksucker.” I didn’t want that.

The more I screamed at Cocksucker–I really started screaming at him to stop. Stop, don’t go over there! The harder I screamed, the more he must’ve ran, and I just lost sight of him. I started crying and screaming, “Cocksucker, don’t! Don’t go over there Cocksucker! He going to kill you Cocksucker! Jesus Christ, Cocksucker, just don’t go over there! Don’t go!”

I stopped and hunched over, trying to catch my breath as I was sobbing, and I sobbed real quietly because I wanted to hear anything that’d happen. I didn’t hear nothing for a bit. I just hunched there panting and wheezing and thinking about poor Cocksucker.

Then I thought, “Well, you know pheasants are pretty smart little birds. They’re about as smart as a whip. Maybe old Cocksucker just up and made it free right on out of this corn field. Maybe I’ll get to run into Cocksucker next time we come out, and we can play chase and–”

That’s when I heard a big old boom, and I knew that Cocksucker didn’t get out.

I started moping my way over. As I came into the clearing on the side of the corn field where Uncle Theo was standing, old Juice had Cocksucker in his mouth and there was blood and feathers and meat.

Uncle Theo took a big old tug off his whiskey that he kept in his hunting vest, and he smiled at me and he said, “Man, Theo, that big old cocksucker is toast. I don’t think we got enough left to make a cheeseburger out of him.”

That poor old Cocksucker didn’t suffer much, I guess, because he must’ve jumped out of the field only about five yards from Uncle Theo. He tatered him all right. Hit him square in the chest from only a few feet away and blew his whole guts out. Wasn’t pretty.

I felt real bad for Cocksucker. I felt like I let him down. It wasn’t like with Monica and he’d done something wrong. He was just being a pheasant. He was just being Cocksucker. He wasn’t trying to do nothing wrong. Him and me were just playing. It’s not like I had a lot friends there. I was thinking we could, you know…

Well, I just stood there and started bawling. Started crying so bad. You got to understand that fellers up north, we ain’t like them fellers on the TV shows with the beers and the holding hands and the crying and stuff like that. We don’t do that kind of stuff. That’s just what they show on TV.

I guess that’s what California guys do. Kind of like these two dumb fellers sitting in front of me. I bet they get together and have a beer and cry on each other’s shoulders and they think it’s pretty cool.

But it ain’t right to cry in front of other fellers. I knew what I was doing was really a pretty awful thing. I could tell by the way Uncle Theo, he turned his back on me and stared more at the bird in old Juice’s mouth, and maybe took another tugs off his whiskey. He didn’t think it was right what I was doing neither.

He kept on hunting after that. I just walked on home. He didn’t ask where I was going. I figured he didn’t really want to know. He was just glad I wasn’t around him, crying like a little girl.

I went back to the house and I sat in there and I cried and cried. I don’t know what happened. Something snapped in me.

Well, couple hours later Uncle Theo came on home. He smelled like perfume. I think he must’ve stopped off at Charlotte’s house and had what he always called a little pokey.

I think I know what a little pokey is now, because they had some health classes here in California when I was going to school. They talked about what a pokey was. The teacher said a lot of words about vageyena and orgasmo, and I raised my hand.

I said, “Does that have to do with having a little pokey?” She looked at me and all the other kids in the class started laughing. I knew I said something wrong, but I also got it right.

Anyway, he came back from his little pokey. The teacher never said nothing about perfume, but I guess once you get one you smell like perfume.

He’d been drinking some more, like the second kind of drunk, because you know us good old boys we don’t do the first kind of drunk. He laid down there on the bed and looked at me just once like I was stupid or something. He squirmed out of his clothes and was just laying there all naked on the bed, drunk. His little thing just sitting out there in the bare air.

I looked outside and I could see his truck, with the shotgun in it. I went out to go and take a look at the shotgun because I wanted to see up close what had done it. After I’d seen it tore up Cocksucker, it made me think a lot more. I wanted to see it. I wanted to see the thing that’d hurt my friend.

You see guns in movies, and you see them lying around everywhere where I grew up back in Idaho. But I never really thought about what it could do to someone. Just rip them apart.

I climbed into the truck and sat on the seat, and just stared at it for a few minutes. This shotgun wasn’t like the one sitting ahead of me in the car. The cop’s shotgun is a pump. You pull the long wood handle under the barrel toward you and it makes that “chuh chunk” noise. That’s the noise that says you’re about to do something.

But Uncle Theo’s shotgun was different. I think he stole it from somebody because it was way too nice for him. It was a Beretta. A really fancy Italian shotgun. People always asked him where he got it, and he’d always smile and be sly about it. But he’d never say.

It was a nice Italian shotgun, and it was called an “auto,” although I think it’s actually a semi-automatic. How it works is you push a button on the side and it slams a shell into the chamber really hard. It’s not the kind of thing you’d want to get your finger caught in, because it’d hurt.

It’s kind of a funny thing, because it ain’t like an .870 pump like the one sitting in seat in front of me. Them Berettas, they got about seventeen different buttons on them and each one seems to do a different thing, or the same thing in a different way. They got about four different ways for the shell to come in and go out. It really takes you a while to puzzle over it.

I just sat there and moved the mechanism on it. I worked it back and forth, up and down, left and right. The shells would pop out and then pop in and I’d hit a button and all of a sudden all the shells in the magazine came popping out onto my lap. I put the shells back in and then worked it some more. All the shells were wet because I was crying on them.

Then I thought about it some more. It wasn’t really the shotgun’s fault. Shotgun was just doing its job like Cocksucker was just doing his. Didn’t mean nothing.

I thought about my Uncle Theo sitting in there naked, all drunk and smelling like a pokey. Sitting there with that smile on his face that said I was stupid. I thought about that fancy Beretta that he had no right to have–I’m sure of that. It started making me mad. Oh, it just made me so mad.

I came back inside the trailer with that Beretta, and I looked down at Uncle Theo, all sitting there stinking like a, well they say stinking like a whore, and I guess that’s why. Stinking like a pokey. He was still out cold.

I held that shotgun in front of him, the barrel pointed right at his gut. I was about the same distance as Uncle Theo was when he took that shot at Cocksucker. I could’ve killed him right then and there, and maybe I should have. Maybe.

I didn’t, though. I thought that wasn’t right. I couldn’t just go shoot a feller sleeping. That’d be worse than what happened to Cocksucker. At least Cocksucker had a chance of flying, although I think Uncle Theo had actually arkansawed the bird. Arkansawing is when you shoot a bird on the ground.  You shouldn’t ought to do that, because it’s dangerous because you could shoot your dog, and they always say it’s unsportsmanlike. I think Uncle Theo had arkansawed that bird because he was drunk and he probably figured he couldn’t hit him in the air because it’s harder to do that.

Just one more damned thing that he did that he cheated on. Like stealing the gun.

I figured I couldn’t just shoot him right in the belly while he slept. I couldn’t arkansaw a feller. I wasn’t like him.

But I also knew that this was my chance to make it all fair, to square things up for me and for Cocksucker. I started thinking about him having that pokey right after shooting my friend. That’s when I knew what I could do.

I took that Beretta, and really careful so as not to wake him up, I put one of the openings in the side of the gun where the shells go in right over his thing. His thing just lay there in the chamber of the gun, and he was still asleep.

I’d been working that shotgun for a while, so I knew which button to push to make the chamber close really, really fast and hard. My finger was on that button for a long time, thinking about the tears inside that shotgun chamber from when I was crying.

After I gave it a long, hard thought, I pushed that button and it made a loud CHINK! noise, all mechanical. And it slammed down hard on his thing and god damn did he cry.