My Drowning by Jim Grimsley

again.
    I had a dream about that look in his eyes. Mama was calling him a cripple cornhole bastard; they were in the kitchen and they were arguing, and she called him a hundred names I couldn’t remember, and when I went in the room she was laughing at him and he was curled on the old, big bed, Uncle Cope curled up in a tight little knot with his eyes nearly swollen out of his head.
    Later, I warned my own daughter never to be alone with him. I warned her right to his face.

UNCLE COPE VARIATIONS
    SOMETIMES THE MEMORIES come even and pace themselves one by one, neatly. Sometimes there are harder places, like rapids in the river, where I am dashed from one side to the other in my little boat. Sometimes there is one thing that I fix on, that I see again and again.
    Uncle Cope returned to live with us when he had served his time. By then his stomach had healed up and his guts were back in place. I tried to see his behind where the cornhole was but nothing showed through his britches
.
    This much is true, but there is more, rising from inside me, wherever it had been hidden. I can remember the day even more vividly, if I choose to release more of the pictures. He came home on a June Sunday when a storm blew in. He rode the Trailways bus to Kingston where there was a small station, and then he hitched a ride to the Jarman store, and hobbled on his crutches across the bridge. The truck driver threw his box off the back of the truck and it landed near one of the round-eyed gas pumps, propped against the thick gashose. Uncle Cope reflected on it, then swung on the crutches up the dirt road.
    The gash across his stomach had never been all that bad. The blade had failed to pierce the abdominal muscles, despite the stories, and his guts had always been right where they should be. The wound hurt him some, you could tell that much, as he crept up the road.
    Otis and I saw him first. We were playing in the bushes near the road when he came swinging along in the dirt, his good leg pumping and his bad leg flopping. We knew there was a storm blowing, me and Otis were watching the clouds, and playing like we were hunting the Moss Pond monster. Otis had a piece of tobacco stick for a gun and I had a nice shaped branch I had found, which was, to my mind, a machine gun like in the war. The monster was mixed up with the Japanese and we were in the army as well as being expert monster trackers. So to have Uncle Cope appear like that was a natural part of the game, and we shot him several times.
    Otis could be fun when he remembered I was half his size. He liked to hit too hard now and then, to remind me I was a girl and weak. He only hit me a couple of times that day. As we got older, he was acting more and more like Daddy and Carl Jr., and pretty soon that side of him would take over. We shot Uncle Cope and ducked down in the underbrush along the road, before he could see which ones we were. He poked that head this way and that, his neck stretching out like a goose. Then he swung down the road toward the house.
    â€œThat shit-ass is back,” Otis whispered. “Mama will bust a gut.”
    â€œHe’s going to take your bed,” I said, because Otis had been sleeping in the kitchen by himself while Uncle Cope was in jail.
    â€œNaw he ain’t. He can sleep in there with Carl Jr.”
    â€œThat’s his bed in the kitchen. Yes it is.”
    Otis puffed up and slammed his fist pretty hard into my shoulder. It was to warn me to shut up. I decided it was time to stop playing with him and ran to the house. The pain in my shoulder had nothing to do with it. But Otis said, “Where you going? You’re mad at me now, like some sissy pants.”
    â€œNo, I ain’t,” I shouted, but I kept running.
    â€œWell, I know a secret about you.”
    I shook my head but stopped running for a moment. I could see he meant it, and I was suddenly afraid. “You don’t know anything I want to know.”
    The wind was