Double Tap

EPILOGUE

A few years ago I found myself sitting in my study, tears running down my face. My aunt had called to tell me that my uncle, my father’s little brother, Evo, had died. He had been diagnosed with throat cancer a few months earlier, the chimney that never stopped smoking, and was in the hospital for tests when his heart gave out. The death certificate read myocardial infarction. In a way it was merciful. My father had passed away two years earlier. Now they were both gone.

In later years Evo’s mental state had improved enough so that he lived at least at the margins of normal life. New medications and therapy helped. While his moods could swing wildly and severe stress could put him in his chair to stare at the wall, he was able to drive again, though he never went far. He ran errands for my grandmother in the years before she died.

As my father grew older and his health failed, I found myself filling the void.

I once had to help Evo out of a scrap with the law. Pulled over in a routine traffic stop, you might think his first instinct would be to run, but it wasn’t. Seeing the red light in his mirror, Evo crossed two lanes of traffic and slammed on his brakes so quickly that a man riding a ten-speed along the shoulder plowed into the back of my uncle’s car.

The fellow ended up on top of Evo’s trunk, upside down but unhurt, and mad as hell. Weeks later my uncle could laugh about it, gapped teeth and all. But at the time it wasn’t funny.

The initial stop for a bad brake light now produced an angry cyclist and a cop, who I am sure was beginning to wish he had never seen my uncle or his car. It was about to get worse.

Screaming at my uncle from behind the cop, the cyclist demanded that Evo be arrested. In the meantime my uncle was fumbling with his wallet.

Told to get his license out, Evo couldn’t get the lumber that were his thumbs and fingers to function enough to slip the license from the plastic window in his wallet. He tried to give the wallet to the cop. The officer wouldn’t touch it, only the license. Evo wasn’t saying anything. He was trying to stay away from the cyclist, whose adrenaline rush was being enhanced by elevated testosterone levels, now that he realized this colossus driving the car wanted no part of him.

At some point, amid the shouting and chaos and with Evo backpedaling up the sidewalk, my uncle tried to pass the officer a twenty-dollar bill. The officer wasn’t sure whether Evo was trying to pay the fine, bribe him, or simply purchase continuing protection against the cyclist.

With the cop in the middle, it must have looked like a comic maypole: a spindly, red-faced cyclist in tights, jumping up and down, shouting, trying to reach around to grab some shirt every few seconds, coming away instead with a few hairs the texture of fence wire from my uncle’s arm. People driving by must have thought the guy was on drugs, chasing someone with ten inches of reach and a hundred pounds on him. If Evo had fallen on the guy, the man’s injuries would have been fatal.

Unable to get his license out, with the cop in the middle and the cyclist pushing them up the street, Evo kept pulling the only thing he could get his fingers on from his wallet: currency from the large open pocket.

With a fistful of bills in his face and an agitated biker climbing up his back, demanding an arrest, the cop did the only thing he could. Evo found himself snagged in the gears of the law, sitting in the county jail, charged with a fix-it ticket for a bad brake light and bribery of a peace officer-a possible four-year stint in the joint, depending on the amount of cash in his hand at any given moment.

It took me an hour to get Evo out of jail with an order signed by a judge. It took me a few more days and a carload of medical records from the VA to convince a supervisor in the DA’s office that he really didn’t want to go to trial, bribery being a crime of specific intent. Evo had full mental disability, certified by the government with shrinks in attendance to testify; he was a man who’d had more voltage passed through his body than most cons strapped to “Old Sparky”; who during periods of his life had difficulty forming the requisite intent to get out of his chair and walk to the kitchen-and when he did, he usually couldn’t remember why he’d started the journey. It was not a case in which to sound the bugle and mount the charge for clean government.

After viewing the size of the box and feeling the weight of the medical records inside, the prosecutor allowed my uncle to fix his brake light and go. And so we did.

But even in death it seems my uncle was ill-fated. My aunt, his sister, was to endure one last losing battle, this one with the VA. I learned years later that my uncle’s military records never properly reflected his first name. At induction, some clerk had typed in the name “Elvo,” instead of “Evo,” so that to this day it is the name “Elvo” that marks his grave. Go online and you can find it-the name Elvo Angelo in the records of the Golden Gate National Cemetery. Like the tomb of the unknown, Evo rests for eternity, under another name.

The experience with my uncle taught me that not all men who die in wars are buried immediately. It also gave me an abiding respect for those who have experienced what most of us have not: the indescribable chaos and horror of battle, and the nightmare memories, images and visions that sear the soul.