Flounce Down Memory Lane, Take #askl;dsjhfkshhag

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“Blackmailed?” My grandmother blinked, her hawk-like beady blue eyes widening another scary fraction. “My grandbaby? Being blackmailed?” She sucked angrily on her smoke, igniting the crumbling end into a dangerous red glow that shortened the cigarette into a third of what it was just seconds before.

You could hear the mother hen in my Uncle’s voice clucking fitfully. “Who is this fool, honey?” Hank asked. Ma-Ma was scowling around the lip of her beer bottle, now; her cigarette butt smashed into a sad cotton accordion in the bottom of her ever-present, “My-addiction-runneth-over”-ashtray.

“Just some creep, Ma-Ma,” I shrugged, stirring my drink lazily with my licked-clean fork. “Some douchebag that saw me and the boys sneaking out’a the train yard after me an’ John were spray paintin’ the sides’a the cars.”

I didn’t care if they knew of my late-night boredom Devil-May-Care-exploits; hell, my mother had done worse. There wasn’t a curveball big enough that I could sling at my tough-as-nails grandmother and expect her to be blindsided. More than likely she’d catch it in mid-strike and fling it right back at me without so much as batting an eye.

“The guy knows John,” I explained. “But I don’t think it goes so much the other way around.”

“Hmmt.” Ma-Ma made a sound of frustration and calculating thought, finishing her beer with a belch of finality, and plucking a new victim from her half-empty pack of Marlboros. “Well, can’t have James get pinned with something else,” she stated, matter-of-factly, out of the corner of her mouth around the smoke; the cigarette bobbing in time with her inflection. “He’s still on Juvi-parole. They’ll throw him back in.” Hank nodded in agreement, wiping the counters with a damp rag.

“Last thing he needs,” My uncle stated.

Ma-Ma nodded. “…And you don’t know who this guy is?” she asked me, her bird-of-prey gaze piercing into me. I’d never been able to lie to that woman.

“Nope,” I swallowed.

“Well, damn–” she cursed, reaching for a nearby unopened Coors bottle and snapping off the cap on the edge of the countertop, the metal lid flying away from the lip of the bottle and jangling on the linoleum. She took a moment to swig from her beer and belch in thought, before saying, “if we don’t know who he really is, there’s no way for us to track him down and beat him.” Unlce Hank was nodding in whole-hearted agreement; a pacifist’s support. “If we can’t blackmail him right back,” Ma-Ma reasoned, “we’ll just have to do something else.”

She slant her eyes over at me on the other side of the bar and pulled on her beer. “I’ll get a photograph of his face and have him killed,” she decided evenly.

“NO!” Hank shrieked; a strident, terrified sound. He pointed a rag at my grandmother, who stared at him cooly, “There will be no killing, here! We can come up with a plan!” he insisted. “Jesus, what is WRONG with this family?!”

Ma-Ma shrugged, muttering to herself about ‘a good a plan as any’, and ‘owes me a favor or three, anyways’, as I put my face into my hands and tried to pretend that I wasn’t the newest from a long line of selfish deserters, narcissists, deviants, and just generally crazy people that chose to breed with other crazy people.

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We take care of our own.