Describe a family member.

Today’s prompt was to describe a family member and I almost took a pass again, then remembered — having just officiated a large family wedding — that crazy Uncle Bill the Pirate is dead and none of you know about him.

Lemme tell ya about Uncle Bill, if I may.

He was a pirate.

I don’t mean he stole things from shipping vessels in Somalia.

I mean he had a hook and drove jet skis chaotically drunk like Jack Sparrow.

Hold up, that’s probably the wrong place to start.

Uncle Bill was a hunter. He was on the Shannafelt side (the side in Bell Hammers that gave us the stories of Remmy flying and crashing prop planes). And there are a lot of hunters in Southern Illinois, Kentucky, and Florida. But Bill went one time and took a piss out in the woods, his shotgun leaning up against the tree. Let’s say it was Remmy’s sawed off ten gage shotgun with the hair trigger from the groundhog story in Bell Hammers. (It wasn’t, that was an entirely different side of the family, but that gun is now immortal and this is half folk tale by now anyways).

That shotgun, leaning against a tree, slipped. When it slipped, it hit a rock and the hair trigger got squeezed. When that barrel went off, the front one went too, so it was both barrels either way.

Blew old Bill’s arm off. Clean.

So he got a Captain Hook claw.

One that separated in half so he could pinch the nipples of his nephews with them, just to taunt them. That’s how I remember it anyways.

Bill one family vacation — extended family — took me out in a jet ski in Kentucky lake. He had a beer can in his good hand and was steering the boat with his pirate hook.

It’s a gorgeous thing, riding as such a young child at stupid speeds on the tiniest watercraft imaginable. You feel as if someone has said, “Bubba: go straddle that torpedo over yonder and hang on.”

Hang on I did until, having rocketed across half the width of Kentucky by water, I heard Uncle Bill shout:

“Gotta piss.” Over his shoulder.

Now.

The last time he’d said that, according to my young mind, he lost his arm to the hungry maw of that sawed off double barrelled ten gauge with the faulty trigger. The one that let him pilot this watercraft whilst the other limb drank.

But rather than say, “I don’t trust you” or “Be safe” I shouted back “OKAY!”

He pulled into a swamp where the waters rested around ancient bay roots. He wove and took that thing as far in as he could, killed the engine. He clambered out and went to one side. I tried to follow and feet sank in muck and mire as if it were a pond in Southern Illinois. He didn’t turn to see me. Something in me decided little boys didn’t get stuck while following pirate uncles into the swamp. Somehow I trudged through and waded out to him. I got up the bank and got to the tree, dropped my drawers and did my business and finished and reset faster than the whole time Bill spend peeing. When he was finished he killed his beer, opened another (where it came from I don’t remember, but I suspect the seat compartment). Then he took off into the wild with me on the back.

“Getting dark,” he said. “Gotta go fast.”

“OKAY.”

He wanted to show a little boy a good time, I think. He started crossing the wakes of massive yachts and speedboats, the largest vessels allowed on that great lake, and we got higher and higher air. He did donuts, he whipped us around, and then upon crossing one huge squall, we hit enough air that the prow of our little torpedo touched the next wave first.

It whelmed us over.

I took in water, couldn’t see. Up was left. Down was backwards. I tumbled and turn and then up, cork like, with my vest. I spat water and looked through the burn in my eyes.

The jet ski was fine.

The boats were clear.

But from the handle — the only one he’d used to steer while the other one remained empty for the drinking with the good hand — from that handle hung his hook.