Uncle Bill's Black Book

Uncle Bill had been in and out of prison his entire life. It’s not like he had a bad childhood, as my father turned out perfectly fine and always praised his parents for the job they did raising their children. No, Bill had just liked getting into trouble, and he did it well.

When I was a kid, Uncle Bill used to love telling stories about pirates and buried treasures. One time, he took me camping and left me alone one night while we were roasting marshmallows. He was just gone. I called out for him and looked around our campsite, but I still couldn’t find him. A whole hour passed before Uncle Bill came through the trees, his pockets rattling with the distinct sound of change being jostled about with each step. When I asked where he had been and why he had left me, he didn’t say. Uncle Bill only smiled and tossed me a shinny half-dollar, telling me to not say anything. When he was asleep, I looked through his backpack that he had brought and found a black, leather-bound notebook. The first page of the book was a crudely-drawn map of the campsite we were at with the note, “10/16 Job: $836.50,” written at the bottom. I was still a kid, but I was smart enough to have known where that half-dollar came from at that point. I didn’t say anything.

A few years passed, and Uncle Bill was sent to prison, yet again. When he got out, I was in my late teens, and Uncle Bill had come to stay with us for a few years while he was out on parole. I was getting ready to go to college at that point. He worked as a landscaper for a small local company. He seemed to be keeping up with everything his parole officer had been telling him to do. Until one day, I started noticing stories in the papers about a string of burglaries that had occurred. We lived in a small town, so a string of anything was big news. My suspicions were immediately narrowed and confirmed when I found Uncle Bill’s black book in the back of his closet. He had been busy. Where once there was only one crudely-drawn map, now the first dozen or so pages had them, all with different amounts scribbled underneath in his rushed handwriting. I laughed, closed the book, and put it back where I had found it.

“Not bad, huh?” I heard the gruff voice of my uncle say from behind me. I turned around, and Uncle Bill was standing in the doorway to his room. “I’ve added to it since the last time you looked at it.” I was scared. I wasn’t sure what he was going to do, and what he said confirmed that he knew that I had looked at the book all those years prior. He could tell I was nervous and told me to calm down, saying that he wouldn’t hurt me. He was impressed that a kid could keep a secret so well for as long as I had. “You need any money to help you with college, kid?” He asked. I hesitantly shook my head no. Even kids that were given full rides needed, or at least wanted, money for college, but I didn’t want stolen money. I think he understood that and told me that, so long as I continue to keep the book a secret, he’d always be there for me if I ever needed help. I shook my head in agreement but vowed that I’d never take any of his money. I liked Uncle Bill; he actually seemed to acknowledge that I existed, unlike my other uncles and aunts. I didn’t think as low of him as the rest of my family but told myself that I’d never find myself in a place where I’d have to steal to get by. I was wrong.

I went to college, just as Uncle Bill was, once again, caught and went to prison. In my freshman year, I met Vanessa, and we fell in love. Before I could pop the question, Vanessa became pregnant with our first child, Timothy, our sophomore year. To support them, pay for a house, and pay for the wedding that her family was strictly against, I had to drop out of college right before starting my Junior year. I got a job at a local factory, and Tim came along just as I was able to put a down payment on a home. We were doing fine for a few years until two things seemed to happen at once: Vanessa became pregnant again, and Tim was nearly killed by a drunk driver. He had been playing baseball with a few of his friends in the yard when the driver jumped the curb and ran over both of his legs with his car. We got him to the hospital. They said that he’d be fine but that he was going to need expensive surgery and a few months, if not years, of rehab to even have a chance of walking again. We were able to pay for the surgery, just barely. Still, the rehab was going to stretch us extremely thin, especially with another kid on the way.

A few months after Tim’s surgery and just as he was starting rehab to relearn how to walk, I found out that the guy who hit Tim had had an accident in prison and died. He had fallen down a flight of stairs and broken his neck against a railing. No one saw a thing. I immediately contacted my parents to find which prison Uncle Bill had been sent to, and to my surprise, it wasn’t the one that the drunk driver had been killed at. Still, I wanted to talk to him.

I took a day off of work and gave my uncle a visit. The visitation room was a big, white room with wooden tables and plastic chairs spaced evenly apart. I was with a group of other people sent into the room, and we each sat at their own individual table and waited. Eventually, the inmates came out and sat at their respective tables, and Uncle Bill sat at my table. He had been shaving but hadn’t recently and had a scratchy-looking five-o’clock shadow coming in.

“I swear I was framed; I didn’t steal anything. Never have, never would!” He said, jokingly, with his hands up in an ‘it wasn’t me’ gesture. Both of us, knowing how false that was, laughed. The tables around us looked at us, probably wondering what was so funny before returning to the loved ones in front of them. Flat out and in hushed tones, I asked him if he killed the drunk driver. Uncle Bill looked appalled for a second, asking if I genuinely believed him to be a murderer. He told me that he didn’t but that he DID use some of his connections to look into the guy and found out that he was a scumbag that made enemies easily. He wasn’t surprised that the guy was dead from what he heard. He did admit that he was glad that the guy was dead and that he believed he got what was coming to him, though. I agreed.

Uncle Bill asked how Tim was holding up, and I told him that he was in a wheelchair for now, but his legs had healed well, and he had even begun to start standing again during his rehab sessions. He still couldn’t walk just yet without falling and crying from the pain, but he was doing better with every session. Bill was glad to hear it, but he could also tell that there was another reason that I had come. He asked what I truly wanted, and that was what broke me. I started crying in front of everyone. Uncle Bill went to reach over the table to console me, but out of the corners of my watery eyes, I saw a guard just shake his head no, and Bill pulled his hand back.

“I told you this day would come, kid,” he said once I was able to get myself back under control, and everyone around us slowly went back to minding their business. I could tell he wasn’t trying to be smug. I told him about how thin we had been stretched due to the surgery, rehab, and baby, and he nodded. “Find the book. You can use it way more than I ever could. And you deserve it way more than I ever did.” I knew what book he was talking about as soon as he said it. I had always held myself above taking my uncle’s dirty money, but if I had to be honest, I couldn’t tell why anymore.

When I had heard about the drunk driver, I think I had secretly hoped that my uncle had had a hand in his demise. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because I wasn’t better than my uncle in any way. I wanted revenge for my kid and the hardships that the man had imposed on all of us, Tim especially. I wanted to believe that my uncle wanted revenge and had had the stomach to actually follow through on it as I was unwilling to do. Oddly, I may even admire my uncle for taking what he wanted. Life was not a forgiving beast, so he chose not to be either. We parted ways, and I thanked him just as the guard by the entrance called that our time was up.

I knew that my parents had kept my uncle's room open, only because they had no other use for it, for whenever he got out again. I dropped by my parent’s house again. In the middle of a conversation I was having with my mother, I asked to use the restroom. I took a detour to my uncle’s room and found the black book right where I had found it when I was a teen. I opened it and found that the first page was torn out, and all the other pages had big, red Xs over their pages with the word “Moved” underneath in the same pen. My heart began to sink as I flipped through page after page of the same thing until I reached the last page. The map on it looked familiar though I hadn’t seen it for some time; it was the first map near the campsite, drawn a lot better this time, that he had taken me to oh so long ago. Underneath the map was “$20,000.” I tried to convince myself that I had read it wrong, but the numbers did not change even after rubbing my eyes.

I tucked the book into the inside of my coat pocket and made an excuse to leave. I stopped at a hardware store on the way and picked up a shovel and some gloves. The rain began to pour down as I drove to the campsite that until this moment had only existed in my memory. I drove there a very different man than the boy I had once been.