Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken

Author:Elizabeth McCracken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

What We Know About the Lost Aztec Children

The old man opened our front door just wide enough to stick his head in and peer around like a bashful jack-in-the-box. Then he rested his chin on the doorknob. He was so short he barely had to bend over.

“Hello?” I said.

“Here’s to you, boy,” he answered, staring at me evenly. The pale gray color of his eyes seemed stingily applied, though his white hair was generous and pumped full of air over his oddly shaped head.

I didn’t know what to make of him, and it looked like the feeling was mutual. He was clearly sizing me up: muddy sneakers, clean otherwise, teen-aged. No danger at all. He finished opening the door and walked in; my mother followed and kicked the door closed behind her.

“Steven,” she said to me. “This is your Uncle Plazo.”

The rest of him was as odd as his head: a tiny old man dressed in a bright serape, navy pants, and shabby loafers. He was four feet tall, if that, proportioned like a child, but skinny as a parking meter. He gripped an unlit pipe in his teeth.

I held my hand out. “Nice to meet you,” I said.

The man took the pipe from his mouth, and with the same hand took mine, so that we both clasped the bowl. He shook my whole arm. “Fucking A,” he answered. “Absolutely, absolutely.” His voice was excited and boyish.

I laughed; Ma shot me a look.

“We don’t use that sort of language, Plazo,” she told the man. Then she asked me, “Where are Helen and Carol?”

“Upstairs,” I said.

My mother started up the stairs, my unknown Uncle Plazo holding on to a fold of her full skirt. When he and Ma came back down seconds later, my sisters trailed afterward. Ma and Uncle Plazo went into the kitchen; Carol and Helen stood in the doorway, gawking a minute, then came to talk to me.

“Who is he?” asked Carol.

“No idea.”

“He’s our uncle?” Helen asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, he could be a great-uncle, but wouldn’t we have heard of him?”

“He could be from Tennessee,” said Carol. Ma was originally from Nashville, and we always considered it a very exotic place.

“He doesn’t have an accent,” I said. “It’s just an expression, you know, calling an old guy an uncle.”

“But didn’t you notice?” said Helen.

“Notice what?”

Helen looked carefully at Carol, who at eleven was our youngest, three years younger than me and two younger than Helen. “Well—” Helen said.

“Maybe he’s just senile,” I said. “He’s old.”

Helen shook her head. “Betty Snow has a brother like that,” she said. “You can tell.”

From the kitchen we heard Ma say, “Plazo, could you bring me the bag of rice from the cupboard?”

Apparently, Ma’s warning about language impressed the man, because he said now, in stentorian tones, “It would be my greatest pleasure.”

We walked to the door of the kitchen. Uncle Plazo was talking about snakes and why he liked them. My mother was just closing the fridge with her foot.

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