Little Gangsters by Aaron McClelland

Author:Aaron McClelland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Coming of age, Crime
Publisher: Aaron D McClelland
Published: 2021-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

Just so you know, Uncle Frank survived – they operated and got the bullet out and it only nicked his bowel so he came out of it okay. He’d spend the rest of his days bragging about being shot to anyone unfortunate to be cornered by him. Frank was one of those people who didn’t make friends, he took hostages and talked endlessly without pause to prevent his victims from getting away.

Auntie Vi was found unfit to stand trial and sent to Essondale, the ‘hospital for the mind’ for a couple years and when she got out she divorced Frank and a few years after that died in a shitty little room in the Travelers Hotel down on skid row after a three day gin binge.

First thing that morning after the party, Bill, Del and Gimpy were back and had Grandma’s yard and the surrounding area cleaned up and put back the way it had been before the party. Bill even planted new flowers to replace the ones Auntie Vi crushed when she fell into the garden and Gimpy scrubbed Uncle Frank’s blood and pee off the white floor of Grandma’s porch. Grandma invited them in and cooked us all a breakfast fit for Kings, of eggs, bacon, toast and coffee. I got red Kool-Aid of course.

But one thing from the night of the party kept nagging at me; Neil kept calling Uncle Frank and Auntie Vi ‘uncle’ and ‘auntie’. He called Grandma Oldstead ‘Grandma Oldstead’ but that in itself didn’t mean a lot because a lot of people did.

I knew Aunt Hazel’s kids lived with her in Oregon, and as far as I knew, Uncle Frank didn’t have any brothers or sisters. So, how did Neil fit into our family?

I started to have my suspicions and looked at all the possibilities and kept coming to the same conclusion. Somehow, Neil was my brother, but I couldn’t settle on the mechanics of it. I knew we didn’t have the same dad because he lived with his own dad in the old COE truck, but did we share a mom? Did my mom have Neil with his dad then give him up when she left the first drunk she married? And when did that happen? Was my dad really my dad, or was my mom already pregnant with me when he married her? I wouldn’t doubt that at all, thinking my dad could be so lazy to marry a pregnant woman. I made my own head spin trying to untangle the various possibilities.

Being that gossip around the neighbourhood that Frankie and I were maniac degenerates and branding us both as outcasts wasn’t cooling down, I spent a lot of time alone because all our friend’s parents wouldn’t let them play with us anymore. It was like arson was as contagious as leprosy and they didn’t want their kids playing with known firebugs. Plus Frankie’s parents were under the typical parental delusion that their son was led astray and I was the bad influence.

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