Chalk dust fills my nose and I sneeze, once, twice, glancing up only as the rumble of the UPS truck interrupts my artistry. Vibrant lines criss-cross my driveway: my building zone for the grand plans that I once had for my universe.
The man leans out of his brown and yellow truck, his youthful face drawn in an expression of pleasant confusion as he takes in the scene. A gangly, long-legged six-year-old sprawled happily on the sidewalk, tangled hair reaching to her back in a matted knot of curls.
“Um,” he begins politely, almost apologetically. “Are you [Shep]?”
I look at him, immediately distrustful and uncomprehending, until he holds it out to me. It’s a coconut, painted like an American flag. It has my address on it. My name.
I take it from him, and the weight is perfect for my small hands. I scamper into the house on bare feet that scatter gravel across my driveway.
“Daddy!” I yelp. “Daddy, Daddy, Captain Coconut sent me a present!”
My father smiles one of his soft, gentle smiles, taking the coconut and rolling it in his broad, weather-beaten hands. The fruit is rough under his soft palms and I reach out to take it from him, hugging it to my chest.
“How about that,” he says, mostly to himself.
It’s what I took to saying, when the phone would ring and I, in my gawky youth, would ask my uncle as many questions as I could. I crammed them into the space between answering the phone and bringing it to my father, as though the questions were my only link to my uncle across those hundreds of miles. “How about that!” I would say, in a piping, excited voice, as he recounted his adventures.
Once, he sent us hundreds of tiny pepper seeds, along with a scrawled promise that they were the next big thing. You could sell them, he said, for hundreds of dollars. My father wouldn’t plant them with me, but he set them in the basement with his old suit and wedding pictures.
Another time, when I was a young teenager, I pulled the tape from a package to reveal a long-sleeved shirt with a kokopeli on the front. The design was simplistic, but I could tell by the lettering that it was his. I cut the sleeves off and kept it hanging in my closet.
When I thought of him, I imagined that he was perpetually packing boxes, his broad, reddened shoulders heaving the items into the cardboard receptacle. He would shake his head, surveying the things that didn’t fit, exclaiming, “Well, I’ll have to put those in the next box.” And so he would, always addressing elements to each of us, even if he hadn’t seen us in years.
There was one week, in May, when he wasn't packing.
No, he was displaying his work—shirts scattered lovingly across a table somewhere in New Mexico. That was where he was living, most recently. He was living in his car, or else he had found the lucidity to care for an apartment.
My uncle was a manic-depressive, plagued by bouts of mania that sent him tearing across the country fits of half-blind euphoria. He would call us then, sounding drunk or disoriented in his excitement. But other times, my father would hang up the phone, shaking his head and looking at me sadly. We wondered sometimes, if we would be his last phone call. He could take his life, I knew, but my father disagreed.
Captain Coconut scored a booth at some important art show. A man there had taken a shine to him—to his enthusiasm and his painful sincerity. And so he would have sat, in flip-flops and a collared shirt that would be torn open halfway down to reveal a pale and tremulous chest. It jiggled when he laughed. They wouldn't have known that, I guess.
It was a complete success—he sold dozens of his beloved t-shirts. He was manic again, I knew, and he would be over the moon.
My father got a call a week after the show. The sun glistened through the window as he lifted the phone from the cradle and greeted the caller with his customary gruff “hello.” The voice on the other line twitched in slow, laborious speech. Drunk, I thought, or high. I rolled my eyes, trying to catch my father's gaze, but he was frozen.
His face was blank, slack, for a long time, but I could see his shoulders square, drawing his chest up and resisting the urge to sag downward as he listened. He nodded several times, as though the man could see his face—and I suddenly, viscerally wished that the caller could see what he’d done to my dad. He hung up without speaking and let out a long, slow breath.
“How about that,” he whispered to himself. He took an unsteady step back as his vision blurred and his throat tightened around the words. How about that.
R.I.P.
