Tio Beto

Tio Beto used to be my uncle. I mean he still is my uncle, but lives now only through the memory. He was a short, stubby man, strong as hell, with a limp carried around since his youth and a right arm reduced to the elbow.
He used to drink alot. He drank so much that I get the sensation of smelling the alcohol in his breath by merely eliciting his memory. It used to crowd his mouth in a stench and wrap around his blurred words, quit his mouth in spasms and strike us in the nose and ears, alternately. We were children back then, given to sensual sensations. It awed and bothered us at the same time, and it happened so often that it was a reality to us. We were sad and grieved and angry at the man, for being so addicted to the liquid. We wished he would break his bottle and mature.
He drank so much that his belly stretched and extended, but always retained a sense of tension and composure as it floated in the center of his body. It was a hearty, strong belly; you could punch it and it would feel like rock where you expected your fist to sink into it at ease. He would hold his belly with his one hand and the stub of the other and either scratch it or burp.
Tio Beto was incredible in some ways. With his faulty pair or tools he did what he could. He could climb ladders and fix roofs, he could used drills and wrenches and pull nails and screw screws. He could replace toilet pipes and make water flow from faucets once again. He could bend bottle caps by the mere act of bending his stub over them, a scene evoking the same awe of pennies places on rails and bent by trains. He could fish without a rod, and would sometimes bring home so many fish we could eat fish for a week. He would hold the fish down with his stub and cut the guts out clean with a knife on other hand. He honestly seemed to have perfected his stub to function as a hand but he could never stop drinking.
I never understood what hid in the depths of his soul. It must've been some deep sadness. Some very deep sadness. I could only speculate as to his reasons. I don't think he knew, for example, exactly who his father was. Two of his brothers, for example, died in his lifetime; he was the sole remaining male of the family, and bound to carry the Arriaga for the generations to follow. He lacked, for example, his right hand. He was, for example, middle-aged and lived with his mother. He never had much of an education. He always had to hustle for jobs.
He never, for example, seemed to have married. There were rumors around town of possible wives hidden in houses living alone with his offspring. It was hard to believe because at the end of the day, or two days, or three days, he would always come back home to his mother, crosses the dining room, t.v. room, and kitchen drunk, stammer sluggishly into the alley where he would sometimes throw up, or head directly to his bed. Sometimes he would threaten to kill himself. I think he tried more than five times- He kept a gun in his room which trigger he would point towards mourning doves, and which I do not doubt once in a while contemplated his own face. He took pills a number of times. The man was definitely sad, and the reasons were many, but which was the real cause is buried with him where ever he is buried.
One thing is for certain: When he spoke of his death, he would proudly ask the people to celebrate when it occurred. He would tell us, only children, to light firecrackers and mortars and turn the volume to the music high and yell "Ya Beto Canhon esta muerto!"
So be it- the day I was told the news I cracked a bottle of wine and drank it in his honor.