Charlotte Perkins married Uncle Boog when she was only sixteen years old, two maybe three years older than me. She was an Apostolic Evangelical Pentecostal when they met. You know, the ankle-length jean-dress and hair-below-the-hips type. She knew almost nothing of the world outside her mama and daddy’s house except the inside of the Well of Souls Tabernacle down on Riggsville Drive on the east side of town. Heck, I heard that they didn’t even have a TV. I mean her family didn’t have TV in their house. I heard that the men of Well of Souls Tabernacle liked to watch Cardinals baseball games on the satellite, so they had a whole TV and satellite set up in one of the Sunday school rooms. I don’t think they ever let women or children look at the TV even to watch shows about Jesus, but what do I know? Not having much faith in that particular brand of religion, I never was inside the church to see.
Aunt Charlotte’s family might not have had TV, but what they did have in plenty was kids of all ages, shapes, and sizes, and Charlotte was one of a diverse crowd somewhere in the middle. She was a pretty girl with high cheek bones, long, straight brown hair, big doe-like eyes, and a healthy, curvy figure though nobody saw it until she shed her Pentecostal garb. Uncle Boog saw it, though, before she was converted. He has always had an eye for diamonds-in-the-rough he has told me many, many times. At least about Aunt Charlotte, I’ll agree that he was right. She shined up to sparkling when she got free of the old ways.
Well, anyhow, when Uncle Boog went a wooing on her in his tight blue jeans, polished cowboy boots, and collared shirt with snap-buttons on the pockets, she fell like a neck-shot deer. He loaded her up in his big blue Ford with its lift kit and big tires, took her to the Krispy House at the Y for a burger, fries, and a shake and to the Hootnanny for a night of square dancing and sneaking kisses in the shadows out behind the shed, and, two weeks later, they were married and living in a small, prefabricated home on wheels about five miles out on Signal Hill Road. Not long after that, she had lost all pretenses of her former religious practices, and she was laying out sunning in a string bikini on a lawn chair in what passed for a front yard, drinking cold beer, and smoking name brand cigarettes. She sure was something to look at, and I think she liked being watched. It was hard to turn your gaze away when you were a young man in the midst of life’s changes and the stirring of previously unknown urges like I was, but whatcha gonna do?
Yes, sir, Aunt Charlotte had become some different kind of woman, but Uncle Boog, though, he never changed a lick, and I guess that’s why they started having trouble in their marriage. He wouldn’t work. She wouldn’t work. They both smoked name brand cigarettes like freight trains and drank cold beer like fish, and neither one had any money coming in from any direction. I don’t know how they got by as long as they did, but this was all happening about the same time that I became Uncle Boog’s partner in crime, and I’m only telling tales out of turn. I don’t know one little bit about their relationship troubles firsthand. Why should I?
Anyway, their relationship never made any sense to me, and it got even worse after they decided they couldn’t live no more together in the same small tin house on wheels. For two or three years after they divorced, he’d show up drunk at the junky, two-bedroom trailer that she had been granted as alimony in their divorce case, and if she was drunk too or high on some homegrown, they might spend a weekend shacked up like a couple of lovebirds. If she was sober when he came to see her, all out hell would break loose and shake the foundations of the Earth. He would bellow out how much he loved her and bang on the bent metal door. She would yell at him to leave from behind the precariously locked door and curse his soul and the souls of all of his relatives, including mine, I guess, though she has always had a soft spot in her heart for me, us being roughly the same age. Eventually, he would give up trying to knock the door in and start throwing rocks at the trailer because, I suppose, he thought that might get him in. Every window in the whole place was busted and covered with cardboard, plastic sheeting, or both, and the thin metal walls were full of big dents and little holes. After a few minutes of her home being pelted with rocks, she would open the door and fling every throwable pot, pan, and dish in the house at him as well as hurl every curse known to mankind. Another thing I wonder, where did a Pentecostal learn to swear like a sailor? Anyhow, after a good cussing out, Uncle Boog usually got in his truck and either passed out in the seat or drove off to bang on some other woman’s door. I don’t know who ever picked up the all the rocks or crockery.
Either a lovefest or a knockdown drag-out occurred for that loving/fighting divorced couple every weekend for no telling how many years, but neither ever physically hurt the other. It all seemed to be about the throwing, not the hitting. Then, one night, Aunt Charlotte pulled a .38 Special on Uncle Boog and shot him in the shoulder while he was searching about on the ground in the dark for more rocks to throw. She called the ambulance and rode with him to the hospital and cried and cried, swearing she would never, ever fight with him again. Uncle Boog never went back to her place as far as I know, and I think I probably would have, given the circumstances. Still, let me be clear, if anybody tells you that I used to be seen out there late of a night after Uncle Boog got shot, they’re damned liars. She was my aunt! But you know how people like to talk. Let me assure everybody who may read this, it would have been very dangerous to hang out with Uncle Boog if a feller were diddling around with Aunt Charlotte. That is a fact, and I wasn’t so fond of diddling then that I would have cared to confront that sort of peril, nor am I now. Trust me. Don’t believe everything you hear.
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