The Brother Years

by Shannon Burke

  For the next few days Coyle moved around in a daze, wandering out into the backyard and rubbing his motorcycle down with a rag, polishing the seat and gas tank and the chrome exhausts. The neighborhood kids gathered in the grass around the bike and Coyle pointed out his favorite features.

  “See, no splash guard. Saves weight. And I switched to a smaller gas tank. Makes it faster. It can jump, too. Look at the shocks. And it’s got pegs for a passenger. I’m going to ride it in the backyard until I’m sixteen. Then I’ll ride it wherever I want.”

  I was pretty sure our parents were never going to let Coyle ride that bike. We were already total outcasts there in fancy Seneca. And having a motocross track in the backyard was pretty much the definition of low-class. I thought the only reason my parents hadn’t told Coyle right away that he couldn’t ride that bike was because Coyle had been so perfect for so long that they didn’t know how to tell him that they were going to forbid the one thing he’d ever really wanted. I anticipated a long, festering disagreement, but as it turned out, the whole thing came to a head quickly and simply during our first baseball practice of the year, and inadvertently, I played a small role in the outcome.

  * * *

  —

  Baseball had a special place in my father’s heart, as he felt it had saved his life. My father grew up around 55th and Western, the son of Lithuanian and Irish immigrants. As far as he told it, his childhood consisted of haunting the vacant lots and back streets off Western Avenue, playing wall ball during the day, and roaming the streets with gangs at night. By the time he was a teenager our father and his friends had gone from stealing candy to smashing windows and breaking into cars. As he told the story, he was headed for a bad end. But our father had one talent. He was a great baseball pitcher, the best pitcher his age in Illinois, and though he almost failed out of high school, he got a scholarship offer from Northwestern.

  So, at the age of eighteen Dad left his street gang and the Southside and moved to the grand, tree-lined campus of Northwestern University. Dad spent five years at Northwestern. He almost failed out twice, but he played ball and attended his classes and he came out the back end with a degree in finance, and wholly infected by the dream of an easy suburban, white-collar life. Forget the streets. Dad wanted to be a business guy, an investment banker, an entrepreneur, someone who made money in an office, not with his hands.

  Dad married my mother, and they bought a house in Seneca, Illinois, close to Northwestern, and over the next fifteen years Dad tried to figure out how to pay for that house. He started a restaurant that failed. He worked as a stockbroker but was laid off in the market downturn of 1974. He picked up part-time work and started taking graduate classes in medicine, but the kids started coming and he had to drop out. For a while he worked as a teacher in Chicago, where you didn’t need to have completed your state teaching certificate as long as you were working toward getting it, but he got laid off from that job because he failed forty percent of his class. That’s right. As a first-year teacher without a certificate my father failed forty percent of his class.

  “I don’t pass people who don’t know the material,” he said.

  The principal begged my father to reconsider his grades, but he wouldn’t do it. That was our father—absolute, unyielding, and impractical.

  By the time I was in middle school Dad had reverted to working whatever job he could pick up to pay the rent, while also taking classes for his teacher’s certificate. In the meantime, he concentrated on what he considered to be his real job, which was raising his kids to be “superior human beings.”

  Like I said, we were woken every morning at five for the calisthenics, except on the days we helped with the paper route, when we woke at three. There was extra math and reading. On the weekends we helped our father with his painting, janitorial, and renovation jobs. I was filling out adult work crews when I was nine years old. By the age of twelve I knew how to professionally clean a bathroom and hang drywall. We were also taught sports, but particularly baseball, and also tennis, which Dad thought was an upper-class sport that we’d “play at the club” when we got older. Every day was crammed with as much work, study, and sports as possible.

  My father called this religion of maximum effort The Methods. And for a while The Methods seemed to be utterly effective. We did well in school and were responsible, obedient kids, at least until that day when perfect Coyle showed up with that motorcycle and became obsessed with the idea of riding it in the backyard.

  A few days later, we were out at the first baseball practice of the year. I was batting. Coyle was pitching. And I was annoying everyone because I kept whiffing.

  “Choke up!” Dad yelled from the outfield.

  “I can’t get around. He’s too fast,” I said.

  A few patches of snow lined the parking lot. The cold, moist, squishy grass of the playfield stretched out to a cottonwood grove in the distance. Fergus, my younger brother, was in center field. Dad was in short left.

  “Cock the bat and bend your knees before he throws!” Dad yelled. “You’re not getting the bat around. You have to cock the bat.”

  “He’s too fast!” I yelled.

  “You’re too slow is the problem,” Coyle said.

  He wound up and threw again. I missed. He pitched again. I missed.

  “You’re too far from the plate!” Dad yelled from the outfield. “You can’t hit it if you can’t reach it. Get in the batter’s box.”

  “I am in it.”

  “Closer!” Dad yelled.

  I got maybe a half-inch closer.

  “If I want to bean you, standing away isn’t going to help,” Coyle said.

  “Did you hear that?” I yelled.

  Fergus, an athletic, stocky kid two years younger than me with a mop of straight, dark hair and a keen sense of mockery, yelled from the outfield, “What’re you, afraid?”

  “Yes!” I shouted. “Do you see how hard he’s throwing?”

  “I’m not going to hit you,” Coyle said.

  “Get closer!” Dad bellowed.

  I inched in closer to the plate. I cocked the bat. I dug in. Coyle wound up and pitched right at my head. I dropped into the dust. The ball whooshed right over.

  “You were crowding the plate,” Coyle said, laughing. “Brushback.”

  Dad and Fergus were laughing, too. “Get back up there!” Dad yelled.

  I stood back up. I positioned myself about three feet from the plate.

  “Stop being a baby,” Coyle said.

  I inched closer to the plate, but was ready to jump away at any moment. I dug in. Coyle wound up and pitched. Whoosh. The ball was past me before I swung. He pitched again. And again. And again. Finally, I dropped the bat. I took my helmet off.

  “I can’t hit him,” I said. “He’s too fast.”

  Dad was already jogging in from the outfield. He hated when any of us quit. He grabbed the bat from me.

  “You gotta cock the bat and step in as he winds up,” Dad said.

  “You gotta cock!” Fergus yelled from the outfield. “See, Willie, your problem, you gotta cock!”

  Dad put on the helmet.

  “You pitch to me now, tough guy,” Dad said to Coyle.

  “That’s what I figured,” Coyle said.

  I walked behind the backstop to watch. Dad dug in at the plate. His athletic prime was long past. He spent his days painting and renovating houses, but he was still muscular and relatively trim and fiercely competitive. He lived for those hours on the playfield. He wasn’t the sort of father who let us win. None of us had ever beaten him in anything.

  Coyle got a ball from the white bucket. He stood poised, lanky, hand in glove, weight on his front foot, studying Dad’s stance.

  “You can’t hit me,” Coyle said.

  “Are you kidding me?” Dad said. “I hit pitchers who
played pro ball.”

  “Like twenty years ago,” Coyle said. “How about this? If I strike you out I can ride my motorcycle whenever I want.”

  Dad made a guttural, scoffing sound.

  “What was that?” Coyle said.

  “That was me saying I can hit you,” Dad said. “It’s just a question of whether I hit it over Fergus’s head or not.”

  “If you’re so sure, let’s bet. If I strike you out I get the bike.”

  Dad let the bat fall.

  “And what do I get out of it?” Dad asked.

  “What do you want?”

  Dad thought for a moment.

  “If I get a hit, I get to cut your hair. I’ll shave that mop off. And you shut up and stop moping about that bike and don’t ride it until you’re sixteen.”

  “Ok,” Coyle said.

  “So you agree?”

  “Why not? I’m not getting to ride it now anyway. So is it a deal?”

  “You’d really let me shave your head?” Dad said.

  “If it means I get a chance to ride the bike.”

  Dad had never lost to us in anything, but particularly not baseball.

  “All right,” Dad said. “Deal.”

  Coyle stepped back on the mound and rubbed the ball.

  “When I strike you out you give me the keys,” Coyle said.

  “And when I get a hit I personally shave your head,” Dad said.

  Fergus was in left field now, holding his hair back like he was bald. “Krishna, Hare Krishna…” he sang.

  “Your shaved head’s going to look great with your druggie friends,” Dad said.

  “They aren’t druggies,” Coyle said.

  “Whatever you say,” Dad said. “You ready, cue ball?”

  I was standing behind the backstop, watching this all play out. Coyle was risking public humiliation to get what he wanted. That was brave, and as much as he annoyed me most of the time, I admired him at that moment.

  Dad held the bat up, waving the tip. Coyle looked at Dad’s stance, where he was positioned in relation to the plate, how much he was turned. Coyle took a deep breath, then wound up and threw.

  Ting.

  The ball hit the fence before Dad could swing.

  Dad looked behind him where the ball had dropped to rest in the dust. He let the bat fall. He sniffed and dug his feet in and cocked his bat. Coyle pitched again. The ball was just a blur. It dipped as it reached the plate.

  Ting. The ball bounced and hit the back fence again. Dad hadn’t even swung.

  “Thanks for showing us how to do it,” Fergus yelled from the outfield.

  “I’m pitching to you next,” Dad yelled at Fergus. “At your head!”

  “Better you than Coyle.”

  Dad got ready again. Coyle pitched. Dad swung and missed. Coyle pitched again. Dad didn’t even get the bat around. He stood there, puzzled.

  “You should be pitching from the adult mound. No one could hit this.”

  “You just gotta cock the bat,” I said. “That’s the problem.”

  Dad turned and pointed the bat at me as if to say, You’re dead.

  Fergus sat down in left center.

  “You can’t hit him anyway. Why should I stand?” Fergus yelled.

  Dad cocked the bat again. He swung and missed. Then he missed again. And again. What none of us had realized was that since Coyle had gotten his new burnout friends, since he’d started to wear the clothes that he wanted, and to act in a way that was more natural to him, he had also started to practice pitching on his own, away from all the coaches and also away from our father, who had been hovering over him his whole life, telling him what to do. Dad wanted Coyle to be a perfect little suburban scholar-athlete, and Coyle had gone along and taken Dad’s instruction and demands for thirteen years, fulfilling every one of Dad’s exacting expectations, but that winter something had changed in Coyle. He’d broken out of the goody-goody mold that he’d been in for his whole life. He’d found new friends and a new way of doing things. There was a joy and an offhand swagger in the way he pitched now, something that had not been taught by our father but was entirely his own. The balls were coming in fast and low and wavering in the air and sinking at the plate. Fergus and I just stood watching as Dad missed again and again. It was impressive, but it was also unnerving. Dad had been one of the best players in the state. If Dad couldn’t hit Coyle there was no way the rest of us could. That was the end of our playing pickup ball with Coyle. He was too good. It had happened all at once.

  After about fifteen pitches Dad hurled the bat against the fence.

  “You can give me the keys when we get home,” Coyle said.

  “Yep,” Dad said. “Let me tell your mom first. Then you get them. Only for the backyard. And only as long as you keep the rules.”

  “Until I’m sixteen,” Coyle said. “Then I ride wherever I want.”

  Coyle knew not to celebrate too much or to annoy Dad. Not that he didn’t have the right to do those things. In our family there was none of this crap about everyone being a winner. You were a winner if you won. And if you won you could celebrate and rub it in to the other person and make them feel miserable. On the other hand, if you lost you had to grit it out and accept the ridicule and go back to work so you could stick it to the other person the next time. Coyle usually took full bragging rights, but he was careful that day with our father, who had a bad temper.

  In the car on the way home there was a nervy, uneasy silence, like someone had done something wrong, but all that had happened was Coyle had beaten our father.

  “How was it?” Mom asked when we got home.

  “Good,” Coyle said.

  “Good,” Dad said.

  Dad motioned to Mom that he needed to talk to her. They went upstairs and Coyle sat at the kitchen table. Maddy came in.

  She was the youngest, six years old, a blond-haired beanpole, gawky and eager to please. She’d been cleaning windows and had a soiled rag in her hand.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Fergus tossed his mitt onto the table.

  “Coyle struck Dad out so he gets to be a badass and ride his motorcycle.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, don’t you know?” Fergus said. “That’s the way it is in this family. If you lose you get kicked in the dirt. But if you win you get whatever you want.”

  * * *

  —

  Later that afternoon we all stood on the porch and watched Coyle straddle his bike and kick-start the engine. We watched him ease the bike into gear. We knew what the neighbors must think—a motorcycle in the backyard to go along with our rusting car and the constant sound of bickering coming from our small house. Lovely. But there was nothing to do about it. Coyle had won the bet so he got to ride the bike. Coyle revved the engine, then started around the yard in a circle and then in a figure-eight and then in a circle again, and for the next months we watched Coyle on the bike until he wore a path in the dirt and until he could go fast enough to kick the bike into second and then downshift on the turns. When Coyle was not delivering papers or scraping cabinets or doing exercises or any of the other extra work demanded by our father, he was riding that bike, getting ready for the day when he would take it out on the streets. Coyle’s long-haired friends came over and examined the engine. They tinkered with it and pulled their bikes alongside his and compared them and all of them rode in a circle like a gang. I think of that now—Coyle, the perfect student, the blue-collar striver, suddenly breaking from Dad’s restrictions and hanging with those new friends, playing ball with them, casting off some of the rules that we’d grown up with, learning to do things in a new way. And anyone who knew Coyle, who knew our whole family, really, and the excessive, combative manner that had been drilled into us for our whole lives, would have known that though Coyle migh
t have at first agreed to stay in the backyard, neither he, nor the rest of us, would be back there forever.

  2

  Superior Human Beings

  Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.

  —James Baldwin

  Five months after Coyle was given permission to ride his motorcycle in circles in the backyard, I was walking out of the junior high on a hot, dry, windy July afternoon. I was taking an art class in summer school, and that hour in the air-conditioned art room, away from the rigorous striving in the house, away from the bickering with my siblings, was pure pleasure for me. For that hour I drew or sculpted whatever came into my mind and nobody told me I was going too slow because we were the poor family, or that I had to push myself and try harder, which was the normal mantra at home. For an hour, in the art class, I did what I wanted to do.

  Afterward, I lingered at school, walking home slowly, reluctantly, crossing the faded white lines of the soccer field, and on this day, as I neared the grove of cottonwoods, I saw a group of kids gathered around a toppled motorcycle in the grass—Coyle’s bike—and at the very center of the group, Coyle and a slender, good-looking kid named Robert Dainty were faced off against each other.

  I knew Robert. He was one of the high-achieving kids that Coyle had sat with in the lunchroom before Coyle started hanging with the burnouts. He was the snide prince of the preppy kids, and even when Coyle was a part of Robert’s crowd he’d never gotten along with Robert. As I walked up I saw that Robert was holding a basketball on his hip and motioning to Coyle’s motorcycle.

  “Oh, come on,” Robert was saying. “If I can’t ride it, at least let me sit on it.”

  “Can’t. Sorry,” Coyle said. I could tell that Coyle was not sorry at all to refuse this favor. “Willie knows,” Coyle said as I walked up. “I can’t let other people ride it, right?”