Harold Shepard made his living as a bit actor who played Uncle Rudy in three episodes of the popular television series The Grayson Sisters. And we loved him. Not just because he also lived across the street, but because he was our hero. When he first moved into the neighborhood, we went out of our heads—you see, we had seen him play the cop on City Warriors and no bad guys ever got past him. None. So when we heard our mothers’ neighborhood gossip that our own Mr. Shepard would be appearing on The Grayson Sisters, we boys saddled up in front of the television at eight o’clock to watch him in his prime-time glory. Those girls in The Grayson Sisters always got themselves into royal trouble, and Uncle Rudy was just the guy to get them out of any dilemma.
We didn’t see Mr. Shepard in person much in the neighborhood, only every now and then getting in or out of his car. He didn’t even cut his own grass. When you’re famous, you don’t have to, so old Mr. Randy from the garden center downtown came over every other weekend with his ride-on mower. But after we saw Mr. Shepard on TV, we waited for him. Watched him. We wanted to be just like him. It’s not every day that someone who lives on your block winds up on TV.
We set up our post in Roy’s house, just caddy-corner to Mr. Shepard’s. Luckily, Roy’s bedroom faced the front of the house, a perfect watchtower. Raymond nicked a pair of binoculars from his parents’ garage, Benny an old video recorder, Georgie a digital camera. On the night after Uncle Rudy made his first appearance in The Grayson Sisters, we took our bottles of Coke up to Roy’s room and manned the station.
We clambered over each other to be the first to get hold of the binoculars, and Raymond being the biggest won.
“What do you see?” Georgie whispered.
“Nothing yet. All the lights are off.”
Roy whacked Georgie on the arm. “Why you whispering? Even if he was there, he couldn’t hear us anyway.”
And even though Roy was right, we all sat there as quiet as could be just like our grandpas taught us to do when we’re out fishing. We never wanted to lose the big catch.
About an hour later, headlights broke through the dark, and we saw a car pull into Mr. Shepard’s driveway. When the motion activated his porch light, we saw Mr. Shepard’s shiny black Cadillac. It took him a while to get out of the car, and then he staggered up the walkway and stairs to the door. Roy put down the binoculars and said, “Man, he nearly lost it going up those stairs.” We all looked back out the window. Mr. Shepard had gone inside. The lights on the Cadillac were still shining.
We didn’t see Mr. Shepard again that week, save for one time when he took out the garbage, but we all parked in front of the television for The Grayson Sisters to see if Uncle Rudy would make a return. Our hope dwindled like a dying candle when the first half of the show aired sans Uncle Rudy. But after commercial break, there he was, this week giving Claudia advice on being responsible at school.
The next morning, the lot of us showed up at school dressed like we attending church. Not a wrinkle in any of our homework papers. Georgie even called our teacher Mrs. Singer “ma’am” and held the door open for her when she escorted us outside for recess. And we couldn’t wait until Friday when we could all go over to Roy’s house to watch The Grayson Sisters.
So we didn’t count on seeing Mr. Shepard while we were out on our bikes, out in plain sight. He was in his yard ripping flowers out of their beds and shoving them into a plastic garbage bag. We rode past his house so slowly that our bikes almost tipped over. We circled around and rode past again. Mr. Shepard kept ripping up his flowers. Roy rode right up into his driveway, and we followed.
“Morning, Mr. Shepard,” Roy said. “You need help with that.”
“Yeah, we can help,” Georgie said.
Mr. Shepard pulled up another handful of flowers, but he didn’t put them in the bag. He crushed the stems in his hand, the red and yellow flower heads drooped. Then he looked up at us. His eyes were as glassy as stones washed up on shore. “I don’t need your help,” he said. He stared at us while he plunged the murdered flowers into his bag.
We rode away wondering what Uncle Rudy would have done.
We didn’t look out for Mr. Shepard the next day, but after that we decided that he was surely sorry for talking to us that way, he was just having a bad day. We all have bad days. Right?
Mr. Shepard took out the recycling that night—our whole neighborhood puts out their blue bins on Thursdays. The next morning before school, we met five minutes earlier and took the long way to the bus stop so that we would have to walk in the direction of Mr. Shepard’s house. The shiny black Cadillac wasn’t in the driveway, so Benny took the liberty of lifting the lid on his recycling bin. Good thing for the Earth that Mr. Shepard recycles: there was a heap of bottles and cans in the bin. Seems that Mr. Johnnie Walker was a good friend of Mr. Shepard’s. Benny dropped the lid, and we walked to the bus stop feeling a little bit closer to our hero.
The Grayson Sisters came on the next night and of course we were parked in front of the television. This episode was a doozy, the oldest sister Meghan got herself into a fist-fight at school. Uncle Rudy sat her down and gave her the real one-two about working out your problems and not being violent towards other people. Roy’s mother nodded in approval when the show was over. We gleamed back and ran straight upstairs to get a glimpse of Mr. Shepard.
His car wasn’t in the driveway, and we waited hours for him to come home. Georgie had even started to drift off, his head nodding back and forth to his chest. When the car finally pulled up, Raymond sat up on full alert, and Benny grabbed the binoculars. We all pressed our faces as close to the window as we could get, our breath made little clouds of fog on the glass. Mr. Shepard wasn’t alone—a red-haired woman got out of the passenger’s seat and walked around to the other side of the car. Mr. Shepard got out of the car and pushed himself up against the woman. She tried to move away, but he pulled her to him. She hit his shoulders. It looked like he was trying to bite her neck, like in a vampire movie. She started to squirm all around, and he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her real hard.
“Hey, what’s he doing?” Georgie said.
“Shut up,” Raymond said.
The woman shouted something then, and Mr. Shepard yelled back. He let her go. He slapped her. She fell to the ground. Mr. Shepard waved his hand towards the street and went into his house. He just left the woman lying in his driveway. After a minute or so, she got up and hobbled off down the street.
“One of her heels is broken,” Benny said.
None of us said anything else after that; we just crawled into our sleeping bags. But sleep didn’t come so easily.
The next week when The Grayson Sisters came on, we stayed outside in the street and kicked around an old soccer ball. We waited until exactly nine o’clock before we went inside. “You missed your show, boys,” Roy’s mom said. “But Uncle Rudy wasn’t on this episode anyway. They said he moved away.”
We went upstairs and sprawled around the floor in Roy’s room. He had packed up the binoculars and cameras in an old cardboard box in the corner of the room. We didn’t really know what to do with ourselves. Georgie said, “I’m going home.” He got up quickly and made for the door.
“What’s up?” Raymond said.
“Something I gotta do,” Georgie said.
We got up early the next morning and took our posts by the window. But we weren’t looking for Mr. Shepard, we were looking for Georgie to see what he had been up to all night. Good thing we did because Georgie was up early too, the streetlights had just gone off. We rushed outside and caught Georgie just before he crossed the street. “Georgie, what’s going on?” Benny said.
Georgie had a folded piece of paper in his hands. He held it up when we approached. “Going to deliver this,” he said.
He let us see the letter, a letter to Mr. Shepard. This is what Georgie wrote:
Dear Mr. Shepard,
My name is Georgie Brewer, and I live across the street from you. I know you don’t know me, your being a TV star and all, but I’m one of the boys who tried to help you with your flowers that day. Remember? Anyway, I just wanted you to know that me and my friends really liked your show The Grayson Sisters and especially Uncle Rudy. We always learned a lot from him. And the more I think about it, the more I’m sure that what you did last night wasn’t right. Uncle Rudy wouldn’t have done that.
We didn’t watch your show last night, but I hear that Uncle Rudy wasn’t on anyway. I hear that he won’t be back. Maybe that’s for the best. But we’ll miss the old Uncle Rudy. He was our hero.
Have a nice day, Mr. Shepard.
Yours truly,
Georgie
P.S. We won’t look through your recycling anymore or try to help you with your flowers. We’ll just leave you alone.
When we finished reading the letter, Georgie took it across the street and stuck it in Mr. Shepard’s screen door.
Later that day, we all ended up going back to Georgie’s house to play Dungeons and Dragons. Raymond got up to get a can of soda, but he paused at the window. “Guys, look.”
We scrambled to the window. Mr. Shepard was standing on his porch, clutching Georgie’s letter. He was looking across the street, staring at Georgie’s house. He looked really sad. We got closer to the window. He strained his neck forward and nodded. Georgie waved first, and then we followed. Mr. Shepard waved back. And we stood there waving, the sound of the video game droning away in the background.
Christine Taylor, a multiracial English teacher and librarian, resides in her hometown Plainfield, New Jersey. She serves as a reader and contributing editor at OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters. Her work appears in Modern Haiku, apt, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Rumpus, Eclectica, and The Paterson Literary Review among others. She can be found at www.christinetayloronline.com
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