My Name Is Venus Black(14)
Moments later, the fence starts to shake and a voice I recognize as a bony, mean older guard named Lucinda screams at me to come down. Then another voice yells, “Are you stuck? Oh my God, I think she’s stuck!”
I don’t bother confirming the obvious. As the commotion beneath me grows, I try to block it out. Eventually, I hear the distinct wail of a fire truck in the distance—and I remember the sound of Leo’s wailing that night.
I curse myself. I curse my life. I take back every wish I ever made on Venus.
It’s a Sunday night in February and Tinker Miller is sitting on his friend Jerry’s front porch, smoking a cigarette. When a wood-paneled truck pulls up across the street, he watches as a lady with curlers grabs a small suitcase from the cab and then takes a small boy from the backseat into the house. The kid has a blond buzz cut, a strange tilt to his head, and Tinker immediately recognizes him as his brother Ray’s boy, who everyone knows is a little off.
He’s seen Inez at this house before. She and the lady must be friends. Tinker always makes sure to stay out of view, since he had a falling-out with both Inez and Raymond some time ago. After he got out of Monroe prison, he showed up at their house and apologized for burglarizing them, explaining that it wasn’t personal, since theirs wasn’t the only house he hit.
But Inez is a vengeful bitch and would never forgive him.
The following evening, Tinker is at a tavern with a few buddies, and the TV news is on in the background. When he hears his brother’s name, it grabs his attention. The reporter is saying the victim, identified as Raymond Miller, was killed in his home the previous evening.
It takes a second for Tinker’s brain to catch up to and believe what he is hearing. “Holy shit!” he exclaims, lowering his beer to the counter. “That’s my brother!” Then they show a picture of Ray’s house on Rockefeller Avenue and he knows for sure. “Jesus Christ!” he yells, frantically motioning to his buddies to come look at the small TV near the register. “It’s my brother who got killed.”
By then the story is almost over, but they say a juvenile girl has been taken into custody. Some people in the bar already saw the story on the morning news. They ask about Ray’s family and then they suggest it has to be Ray’s stepdaughter who was arrested.
Tinker doesn’t know what to do, how to act. People keep telling him how sorry they are and buying him drinks. It dawns on him that having your brother murdered is a pretty big deal.
Truth is, Tinker always resented Ray. It was like Ray got everything Tinker deserved. Tinker had been the one who was so good at tinkering on cars in the garage that his dad dubbed him Tinker—his real name is Thomas—but who got the loan to go to school and become a mechanic? Ray. Who ends up as a short-order cook? Tinker. Who gets to be a dad? Ray.
But Tinker doesn’t want to speak ill of the dead. The one to be mad at now is Venus. Last time he visited his brother, he could tell just by looking at her that Venus was a little bitch. Raymond called her “a brat on steroids.” In the bar, when Tinker starts calling Venus a murdering bitch, his friends get all riled up. They say stuff like, “Oh man. That’s so fucked up, bro.”
One person shows Tinker the paper from that morning, but it doesn’t add much. As the night wears on and the free drinks flow, Tinker finds himself explaining that Ray was a good man, a great mechanic, and he didn’t deserve to die. By closing time, he gets all choked up thinking how close they’d been.
The next morning, Tinker lifts a Herald from one of Jerry’s neighbors. The story about his brother is on the front page again, this time with Ray’s picture. Seeing his brother’s face there makes him wonder if he should go down to the 7-Eleven and buy extra copies for souvenirs.
He eagerly reads the story, but they don’t mention Ray having a brother. It’s mostly just about how the neighbors are all shocked. “They seemed like a nice family,” said one lady. “The daughter seemed like a good girl. She was always babysitting her little brother. Sometimes she would walk him around the block.”
Tinker thinks about actually calling Inez to get some juicy details, but she’s always hated him for no good reason. She’d probably hang up on him. No one at the bar knows that he did a stint in Monroe, and Tinker doesn’t think it should matter.
When Tinker returns to the bar the next evening, everyone still wants to talk about the crime. But since he doesn’t have any new information to add, he’s embarrassed, like he’s letting them down. He gripes loudly about being left out of the loop by Ray’s horrible wife, Inez. When not a single person buys him a beer, he feels robbed.
The next day, Tinker is flipping burgers at work when he remembers seeing Leo across the street from Jerry’s. And he had a suitcase. It makes sense that he’d be staying with a friend of the family. Inez was probably a basket case, and being such a selfish bitch, she must have just pawned him off.
The more Tinker thinks about Leo, the more surprised he is to realize he’s his own flesh-and-blood nephew. It hadn’t ever occurred to him to think of Leo that way. So, shit, as an uncle, Tinker should have some kind of rights, shouldn’t he?
Leo should be with family. And not family like Inez, who obviously has to be a horrible mother since she raised a vicious, murdering bitch like Venus. And since his and Ray’s parents are dead, and he’s pretty sure that Inez’s estranged parents still live back in Greece, this poor kid doesn’t even have grandparents to take him.