The Cigarette
by Conrad Lovelle
Copyright 2011 Conrad Lovelle
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The Cigarette
I
For me it was always fun when my uncle came to stay. My mother had other feelings. His short-notice visits emerged out of disorder, overshadowed by tension. They were rescue missions.
My oldest brother wasn't home and I watched anxiously for him from the bedroom we shared, peering out a corner of the window near the foot of the front porch steps. In the background his favourite Ventures album scratched and wailed from the lone speaker on the RCA.
My Uncle arrived, stumbling recklessly from the shallow alcohol-fuelled camaraderie within the car of his faceless cohort. Narrowly rescued by the flimsy porch railing he climbed the staircase to the front door - the kitchen door, where my anxious and angered mother would greet him. It was the same thing every time, he showed up drunk and it flew directly into the face of the very help he had agreed to come here for.
I went to the dresser and turned the volume up to the unmarked level of isolation. I didn't hear their exchange and I didn't want to hear it. She had to deal with my father's devil-may-care drinking when he came home hours late from work on countless nights and she didn't need more of it from his brother who was supposed to be here for help. She was protecting her nest.
My tension doubled with every beat of the music when I wasn't by the window, a few minutes was all I could take at one time. I was virtually split in two throughout it all; on one side the lure of the musical escape, and on the other the nerve-racking fear of capture. By four or five songs I had stolen as much pleasure as I dare from those records my brother fiercely refused to share. I rushed to erase the scene, replacing everything exactly as I had found it. I slid the black vinyl disk back into its cardboard sleeve and with precise measure aligned the edge of the label back into its slot beside the others on the brass wire rack. My nerves were taut and I jumped at the sudden thunk! of the latch as it sprang from my grasp and sealed the player shut.
I wiped the sweat from my hands and stopped to listen. I could hear my mother, she was back down doing laundry in the utility room next door.
II
I grinned eagerly as I stole quietly up the stairs. I stretched two steps at a time because I couldn't wait to see him.
I stood unnoticed in the doorway from the living room to the kitchen. He never changed. He looked like Jimmy Dean and Elvis Presley, the centre of his combed hair flopping forward in a wispy waterfall, his body slightly leaning as he sat. He smiled and laughed between inaudible words and long deliberate pulls on that cigarette.
There was something dramatic about all that, the way he pinched it between his thumb and two fingers to light up his palm, a commanding plume rising out of his fist; and in the way he gazed deeply and obediently at the ember as he exhaled and flipped it to rest perfectly between his first two fingers above the ashtray.
His head bobbed as it turned. "Connie! How are you, come here, come and sit with me." he slurred. I grinned and rushed over, it was fun when he was drunk. I wiggled onto his knee as he hugged me exuberantly, bathing my face in the fruity foulness of his spirit-soaked smoker's breath. "How old are you now?"
I answered proudly, "Four and a half!"
I don't remember much about what was said over the next few moments, I was busy thinking. The smoke was hypnotic, snakelike as it rose in many filmy layers from the tip. The glow of the ember brought strange peace-like warmth to my heart. "What is it like to smoke?" I asked, "What does it feel like? What does it taste like?"
"It's really something" he nodded, demonstrating with another animated drag which he exhaled through a key-hole in the side of his mouth, "It's cool, it makes you tough, why don't you try it".
I knew he was right. My oldest brother was tough; he was always sneaking across to the clearing with his friends to smoke. I did not want to be tough his way though, he was mean, but he had taught me long ago that I had to be tough. His anger was merciless; his strut was imposing, delivering an unspoken message that violence could erupt the next instant that we were alone.