asterisms

WORDS : john ricciardi ART : patrick rocard & sarah raphael MUSIC : David Murphy

     Shuffle, crease, and cut. Slap-slap, slap-slap, slap... my first card hand, dealt with studied nonchalance by an uncle who had decided that the time had come to introduce his attentive pupil to the dandy knave of games.

     "Pick them up. Don't show them." He watched me. Did I remember the combinations he had assembled on the table, set out in ascending order with recitations of dwindling odds? I knew from the start I had landed upon initiation's majestic pinnacle. The figures were black all, starkly regular like the fins on a bomb.

     "No cards." I closed the hand, tucked it into my palm. My uncle, expectant, blinked in surprise.

    "No cards," he recapitulated, pursing his lips at the novice player before drawing two for himself. He disclosed two pairs and a tag-along.

     "Okay; show me." He peered from under an eyebrow. I dropped the constellation face-up on the table. It was a perfect climb on the simplest scale from the ace in unity's guise, up along the number line in spots, all the cards stamped with the deck's dominant suit: the youngest pure cluster in the heavens. My uncle whistled, shook his head, and examined me with the other eye.

     "In forty years I've only seen one," he said, "and never on the deal." He collected the cards, then rose from the table. He wished to leave me my first game exactly as it was.

    That uncle was present at my grandfather's house as well, when I played outside throwing a knife at the old, double-garage doors. An uncle by marriage, he had come with auntie to visit that day. Thunk! I'd been practising for a while.

     "See that spot?" I waggled the butt of the weapon towards it as he wandered by.

     "Uh, huh," he noted as zip, zip, the knife circumgirated across the yard, thwang! to hit not close by, not vaguely in the vicinity, but the dead-centre of that knot in the wood. "I don't know who was more surprised, he or I," my uncle declared later to his wife.

     They had raised daughters, bouncy cousins of mine. We children would play in the cellars while the adults lounged in the sitting rooms overhead. Boys and girls, we crawled at hide and seek with the lights out.

     "Sex-games," we heard my mother jump to conclusions one day, "they're playing sex-games in the dark down there." Stern uncle came to investigate, snapped on the lights to blinking children scattered in different corners. Creeping around after each other in the dark was all we had thought of so far. He rapped at the door of the downstairs toilet.

     "Your family's leaving. What are you doing in there?"

     "Loose bowels," I confessed.

     "Puhfwew! I'll say," said he.

     Even when we cousins, adolescents by then, had been brought together in the mountains, boys in one room, girls in the next, he never seemed to mind about his daughters jumping out of bed in their night-shirts on chilly mornings, with fried-egg breasts poking through the light fabrics.

     "Full bladders," he snorted at us boys with tuber-stiff undershorts on our way to pee. "Anything will do at your age," he surmised.

     He hadn't picked up a roll of the genes equivalent to those of the family into which he had married. His sisters and brothers in law are pushing well past eighty, most of them widows and widowers. He shut down at seventy, as did most of his crop.

Departed uncle, I know you're dead and done; but mightn't you see a way to happen along now? It's because I know someone in real trouble; and to help at all I need a clean break, a neat pass through a razor maze. It took me some time to hit on the link between you and my luck. That bridge mouldered in the backwaters of mind like a sunken raft, old, jumbled half-submerged logs; but the bad news is big, and it's getting worse fast enough to have me scraping away here looking for a shiny-bright, land-it-right, spot-on strike.