Gargoyles by Bill Gaston Page A

laughing. “Mid-May?” He’d also found it freakish that you could always hear the roar of waves, the constant roar of waves.
    â€œCheers, mate.”
    Philip liked how his Uncle Phil thanked him. His uncle’s namesake, he had fetched the cigarettes from the condo’s living room, the kind of chore he’d been happily performing for two days, wanting to get to know his English uncle, his only uncle, whom he got to see once each year. Interesting, these notions of “relative” and “English.” And Uncle Phil was entertaining in ways Philip’s parents certainly weren’t. Those expressions ofhis, for instance the way he sighed and said under his breath, “Deep carni
val
,” pronouncing the second word like the French might. What did Uncle Phil mean by that?
    From the doorsill Philip watched his uncle suck absently on his cigarette, take it out to discover its unlit end, then swear and lurch out of bed with more energy than he would show all day. Philip’s mother wouldn’t let Uncle Phil smoke inside the rented condo because of the children.
    Uncle Phil still wore the bathing suit he’d worn last evening in the hot tub. He had the kind of body, Philip noted, that you expected of an English man, especially a musician, in that it was without defined muscle. Even his uncle’s tan seemed not very attached to its skin, and mismatched to the pale tone underneath. Philip had to agree with his mother, whom he’d overheard telling his father that “Your brother is two years younger and looks ten years older.” She’d said it accusingly, and Philip knew this had to do with his uncle’s lifestyle. Or, as she put it, “How your brother lives.”
    â€œWe did it backwards, darling,” Uncle Phil shouted again to Aunt Sally, who didn’t hear because she was out at the car “searching the boot” for sunscreen. By backwards he meant they shouldn’t have gone to Jamaica before Canada, because “the other way ’round wouldn’t have felt so freaking frigid. Next year we do cold
then
hot.” Uncle Phil said “freaking” a lot and slipped occasionally. At each slip Philip’s mother closed her eyes, and once took his father away for a hissing talk.
    They sat eating breakfast quickly, Philip’s little sister and brother racing to lick jam off their toast before they were told to stop. Philip’s mother was impatient at the stove, waiting for the bacon to cook. Uncle Phil always wanted bacon, crispy bacon. Philip enjoyed the way his uncle defended his sins: earlier thismorning, announcing that she was off to the resort store and what would people like for breakfast, his mother had startled at Uncle Phil’s, “Any deeply sustaining pork product!” booming from behind his closed bedroom door. There was something so English in what he said, sly like the book
Winnie the Pooh
was sly.
    The idea this morning was that Philip’s mother and father and Aunt Sally would go whale-watching while Uncle Phil took the three kids to the main beach to enjoy the warm day. Twelve, Philip was old enough to appreciate the rather undramatic grey whales surfacing to breathe, but he got seasick even on calm water and in any case he had to help, as his father put it, “poor Uncle Phil look after the hordes.” Uncle Phil did look grateful that Philip was staying behind. He and Aunt Sally had no children — another side of Uncle Phil that seemed to rub his mother wrong.
    Eating bacon, pretending to try to entice them away from whale-watching, Uncle Phil said, “You’re actually choosing the big grey blobs over ‘the kite trick’?” He refused to tell anyone what the trick was, though Aunt Sally nodded while she confirmed, “It’s a good one.”
    After breakfast, his parents and Aunt Sally gone, Philip stood in the bedroom door again to watch his uncle pull a canvas hunting