CAUTION Men in Trees

Please to Forgive Sloppiness

P L E A S E T O F O R G I V E S L O P P I N E S S arry's Uncle Stuck, he lands on Harry and Lyla time and again like something shook from a tree. Life's been, for Stuck, a high-wire act that's left him upside down in untidy corners, feeling lopsided, baleful, his eyes dry and sore, his elbows cut, his nose snotty, and a thumb broken and off-shot for good. It's amounted to the romp and stagger cowboys and cowgirls sing about. Stuck's got bad knees, and his thyroid's been nuked. A month back, he turnedfifty-seven. Tonight he phones Harry and says he's flying in. "Flap flap," he says. "Here I come. U . . . nite . . . ed. Fucking-duck airlines, the red-eye." "Got a flight number?" Harry says. He's frisking himself and picking up books and setting them down, shuffling through mail and flyers, his hunt for a pen deteriorating into slapstick. Stuck says, "Yes.Oh, God, yes." Stuck's phone clanks, then bounces. Goes dead. The line sounds hollow. Harry says, "Stuck?" He's located a leaky ballpoint in the kitchen junk drawer. He blows in the phone. No H Stuck. "Youthere?" he says. "Stuck?" He covers the mouthpiece, listens, and gets back only the cheap taste and touch of plastic. "Hello? Hello?" From Stuck's end, more echo than word. "Harry?" Stuck says. It's his footloose voice, the one that tells Harry Stuck's cut and run from some outpost where he's used up his welcome. He's scammed some dupe, left some simple soul holding the bag, and there's something alive and stinky and clawing inside it. Harry says, "Stuck?" "Dropped the son-o-bitch," Stuck says. "What about that flight number?" "Somewhere. I can't put a hand on it." Dead air, then a rusty phlegmatic cough, followed by that footloose voice. "I can see it with my mind's eye, " Stuck says. "You know what I mean? Clear as mud." He tells Harry how he wrote everything out in script a monk would envy, the time and flight number, on that yellow legal pad. He used a felt-tip Flair. "Where are you?" "Oklahoma." "You're in Oklahoma?" "Tul. . . sa." "This tonight is when you're coming? I mean, it's almost tomorrow . Is it tonight or tomorrow night?" Harry wants time and flight. He says, "We're talking about in just a few hours—is that what you're saying?" "The red-eye. I'm packed. My suitcases are jammed deep into my armpits, and I've got a toe on the threshold. You'll fetch me?" Harry says, "Count on me." It means a one-hundred-and-ten-mile, two-hour drive from St. George,Utah, south to Las Vegas, but Harry's done it before. "My ticket," Stuck says. "It's somewhere. There's stuff all Please to Forgive Sloppiness 133 around. Whose, I don't know. Everything's glued to something else." Harry says, "You be there. I'll be there." Uncle Stuck is Harry's blind spot. All Harry's life, Stuck's been Harry's ABCs, his p and his q, his Santa Glaus and his Green Hornet all rolled into one. Jacob, Stuck's older brother who lives in Las Vegas, is wise to Stuck, has him pegged. Holidays, down in LasVegas,Jacob holds forth on Stuck. "It's not complicated,"Jacob says to the odds and ends of the family who've gathered to eat,and he circles the table, a hammerhead shark. "Adrunk's a drunk," he says. "It's mathematical , the way shooting pool is mathematics. Ask any drunk you see on any street in any city of the U. S. of A." Then he sits down and dishes up lamb and mashed potatoes. "Drunks kid us," he says, "not other drunks." Stuck is, plain and simple, a drunk. Why does Stuck roll cars and walk away slightly battered, pinkie-finger Band-Aids horseshoed over the bridge of his nose, crisscrossing his elbows, but otherwise he's clean as fresh laundry ? Why does he rise from the dust like it's Resurrection Day? Because he's a drunk. "He's sensitive," the family hums. "Life has hurt him," they sing. All old songs. Unrequited love, a lazy eye at seven...