Chapter 2

Jonah Elias Potter was the youngest of the family. My old man was the oldest and then my two aunts and Uncle Eli. My Aunt Sylvia and Aunt Faith fed the men of the house and took care of most of the housekeeping since my grandmother had died giving birth to Eli.

By the mid 1950's, my father left home and joined the air force, where he became an accomplished jet fighter pilot. He was so good in fact, that he was eventually assigned a position in the air force's public relations and demonstration wing, the Thunderbirds.

Whenever I think about my father, I always picture him in a dark blue flight suit, wearing a brilliant white helmet and a dashing silk scarf. His smiling face and twinkling eyes are forever captured on an official air force 8" x 10" glossy in a simple black frame that hangs over my Granddad's writing desk in the big house on the hill.

It was in 1961 when the big air show crack-up took my old man and my memories of him at home are vague at best. Sure, there were other pictures of him at the big house taken when he was younger, but to me they all looked exactly like my Uncle Eli. The only difference I could see was that my father wore a flight suit and a shiny helmet.

Ten years my elder, Eli was at once a father and a brother to me. Not only was he a spitting image of my old man, but Eli took it upon himself to be my own personal behavioral and moral monitor, too.

One time he caught me throwing rocks through the windows of Mr. Hanley's greenhouse about a block away from the big house. I was about ten at the time and I have no idea how Eli found out what I was up to, but he found me and beat the living crap out of me. By the time he had finished, I seriously thought I would die.

Eli told me as he carried me off to the big house to be nursed by Aunt Faith, that the beating I just got was a hell of a lot better than the whole summer he had to spent in reform school at Hyattsville after he and some friends had vandalized old man Carter's mill. Eli said I wouldn't ever have to worry about reform school, though, because if he ever got wind of me screwing up again, he was going to kill me. I believed him.

After that, I just kind of figured that Eli might also kill me if he ever found out about all the shit I was stealing all over town. It was all sort of a funny game to me and whenever I got my newest booty home undetected, whether trinkets from a neighborhood five and dime store, or someone's change purse or winter gloves from an unattended car, I felt just like a gangster in a Saturday matinee movie. Uncle Eli had me so scared after that thrashing, that I never again bagged another thing in my life. Ever.

A couple years after that, I think, it was Eli that showed me how to properly smoke cigarettes and drink beer. The cigarettes were Lucky Strikes and the beer was Narragansett in big 16 ounce bottles. As we shared this fine, age-old manly ritual together for the first time, Eli also told me that the day would soon come when I would stop teasing the girls at school and start trying to kiss them. Some of the finer details he described to me sounded utterly ridiculous. I could hardly believe a word he said.

My poor mother could never decide whether Eli was a good influence on me, or a bad one. She was usually too busy trying to support our little house to fret over it for too long. Mother could have asked Granddad for help, and he would gladly have given it, but that wasn't mother's way. Fiercely proud and independent, she was never idle long enough to feel sorry for herself.

Mom was the bookkeeper at the big Birdseye vegetable plant across town by day, and she kept busy taking in sewing jobs nights and weekends. Mother could cook, too, and every now and then, various groups around town would hire her to cater a function. Lord knows she had enough work already, but her tenacious pride would seldom let her turn down a job.

I saw Uncle Eli a lot growing up. After my old man died, he always seemed to be around our little house, even very late at night or very early in the morning. I never really paid much attention to the fact that Eli spent so much time with me and my mother. It just seemed natural to me because it had always been that way. Besides, I liked having Eli around. He never bullshitted me and he always made me feel like a grown-up whenever we were together.

Mom and I generally saw eye to eye, but we had our disagreements, too. Whenever I would flare up and get ugly with her, though, she would invariably get all defensive, begin crying, and admonish me for not being good to her like my dead father. If uncle Eli happened to be there, he would always get right up and quietly leave the room at the first mention of my old man.

It was impossible for me to win an argument with her. I know Mom knew that whenever she cried, she had me cold, ....completely over a barrel. I would do anything to make her stop at the first hint of a welling tear. Mother practically worked around the clock to support us and most everything she did was for me––and I knew it. It had always made me feel guilty that she worked so hard for us and I just could not stand to see her cry.

Deep down, I know I felt sorry for her for losing my old man in the accident. All she had to do was mention my father and the image from the glossy 8" x 10" air force portrait would flash through my mind and haunt me like a demon, ....the cocky smile and twinkling eyes, his damned flashy silk scarf....she must have adored the bastard!

When my father and mother were married, my mom was a beautiful blonde Bavarian Mδdchen who worked as a secretary at the air base in Germany where my father was stationed. She was big and tall with a drop-dead figure, smoldering brown eyes, and an impish smile that could tease the devil himself. Mother always told me that my father had fallen in love with her ankles. I guess I just didn't get it then, but show me a slender ankle where it meets a sculpted calf today and I'll show you a guy with a growing problem. Apples not falling far from trees and such, you know?

Right along about the time girls started changing–––just as Eli told me they would, I started noticing all the men in town staring after Mother whenever we went out into town. Though it never occurred to me for the longest time, my mother was as they say, pure and simple "....just plain ol' sexy....a blonde bombshell." Come to think of it, my mom was sort of like a Marilyn Monroe–––with fucking talons. By the time I got to high school, mom was already past 40, but she was still hot stuff in anyone's book. All my buddies from school were madly in love with her.

Then one night when I was supposed to be at a basketball game, I happened to come home early with a bit of an upset stomach. What I saw in my mother's bedroom on the way to my own was an activity I had until then never imagined my mother engaged in. Several weeks later, I witnessed my Uncle Eli officially becoming my stepfather when he married my mother in the judge's office downtown.