The Brother Years

by Shannon Burke

  “Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have remembered it,” Dad grumbled.

  “Oh, please,” Mom said. “After all your groaning.”

  Dad pulled into the parking spot and Coyle opened his door and jogged toward the lit gymnasium. It was about ten degrees out, but he was just in his parka and shorts. He liked to show he didn’t care about the cold.

  Dad turned in his seat, grinning.

  “Guys, there’s a lesson here. I said not to ask for help, but I was wrong. See,” he said, turning to our mother. “I can admit I was wrong.” Then, to us, “I never learned how to talk to people. That’s one of the reasons I moved here. You live around the good people and you learn how to get along with them and your lives will be easier than mine. That’s why we spend all the money to live in Seneca. Good job, Willie.”

  I held a fist up.

  “The winner,” I said.

  “It was the right thing,” Mom said.

  Dad opened his door and a blast of icy wind swirled. We all got out and started across the parking lot toward the gymnasium and went up the snowy steps and as we entered the lobby I noticed the other parents glance over to see who’d come in and there was that familiar feeling of knowing there was something wrong with us. Other adults wore trench coats and leather gloves and black leather shoes. Mom and Dad wore old parkas and sneakers. And there was also something wrong with the way we acted, some indefinable flaw in our expressions or maybe the defiant posture we took when we came into a room, but whatever it was, adults seemed to pick up on it instantly. When I was a kid I hadn’t noticed it, but that year I turned thirteen, the same year our battles blossomed, I had begun to understand that people who didn’t even know us only had to glance at us to see that there was something different about us and we didn’t belong in the fancy suburbs.

  Inside the lobby, Fergus bent to pet a leashed collie that had been tied off to one of the doors. Fergus ran his hand along the dog and Dad stood over Fergus and felt the same thing I did—discomfort around the well-dressed adults with their silent disapproval, and defiance about our way of acting. So Dad did what he always did when he felt uncomfortable. He put on a big show of not caring, and made it worse.

  “Is that dog smelling you?” Dad said loudly. He looked around to see if anyone had heard his joke. “Hey, Fergus. I think that dog’s smelling you.”

  A few parents pointedly turned away. Mom blanched.

  “Let’s go inside,” Mom said.

  Fergus stood from the dog and we walked into the gymnasium with the whomp of basketballs and the teammates calling to each other. My friend Jimmy stood inside the doorway, waiting for me.

  “Are you ready, soldier?” Jimmy said.

  “All set, commander,” I said, and Jimmy and I started off together, not toward the basketball stands, but going along the basketball court and out the far door of the gymnasium and into the main body of the high school, all the while acting as if we were on a top-secret mission. We were both in the eighth grade. We’d go to that high school the following year, and in my mind there was an aura to the school, almost like a church. New Trier! The celebrated high school with dozens of world-famous alums. The best high school in Illinois! My father had bought the hype completely. New Trier was the focus of my father’s dreams, and was meant to be the lever to raise us up from our blue-collar drudgery.

  Jimmy and I wandered off from the gymnasium. The school had been built in many stages and had a pleasing, unsymmetrical feel. It was more like a compound than a single building. There were narrow hallways with rounded ceilings, low passageways, and mezzanine levels. The lights were off, so it was shadowy and eerie in the quiet hallways, like going into an old castle at night. It took us awhile to get our bearings, but eventually we found the main stairway and went up to the second floor and, meandering, found locker 254.

  “Target in sight, commander,” I said.

  I checked a series of numbers I had on a sheet of paper and then tried the locker combination once. It didn’t work. I tried it again and the second time the latch lifted and I pulled the handle up to reveal a perfectly organized locker with stacked books and a hung sweatshirt. Of course Coyle kept his locker perfectly.

  On the top shelf I saw the edge of a large picture book. I pulled it out to reveal a drawing of a dragon on the cover—Other Worlds.

  “Success,” I said.

  I opened the book to see if it was defaced in any way. I paged through the artwork of barbarians and wizards and giant insects and warriors with swords and lasers. It was undamaged. I breathed a sigh of relief. I loved that book.

  “Why’d he take it?” Jimmy asked.

  “To be a dick,” I said. “He thinks everything wrong in his life is my fault.”

  “You could take something of his,” Jimmy said.

  His baseball glove hung temptingly on a hook. A few months later I probably would have taken his glove, but at that time I was still trying to be evenhanded in my revenge.

  “He’ll just go crazy if I do that,” I said.

  I shut the door to the locker, and Jimmy and I walked back through the dim, quiet hallways and on to the gym with its caged lights and the crowded stands. The game had already started when we arrived. It was the biggest game of the year—New Trier versus Evanston. The freshman team was undefeated because of Coyle and a guy named Lanny Prophet, who played point guard and was a great passer.

  Jimmy and I walked all the way up the steep stairway to the empty seats at the very top of the stands. I sat back and began paging through my book. I glanced up now and then to see the teams running back and forth, but I didn’t pay attention. I never watched Coyle playing. I pointedly wanted to show I didn’t care.

  “They’re not passing to Coyle,” Jimmy said after awhile.

  “What?”

  “They haven’t passed to him the whole game.”

  I began to watch. Coyle sprinted up and down the court and played defense and scrambled for loose balls, but Jimmy was right. The guards weren’t getting the ball inside to Coyle. At first I thought it was because Coyle was being guarded closely, but he kept getting open and calling for the ball, waving his arms.

  “He was just totally wide. And they missed it!” Jimmy said.

  “He probably pissed them off,” I said.

  Jimmy walked down the aisle and talked to some kids below us. When he came back up, he said, “The other guys on the team all know each other. The second-string center is their friend. They want him to start. So they’re not passing to Coyle.”

  When Coyle came out to rest, the second-string center went in and the guards immediately began passing to him on almost every play. He scored a few baskets. Then Coyle went back in and no one passed to him. It was obvious what was going on.

  Coyle was not a complainer. Maximum effort was in the DNA of our upbringing. So Coyle fought for rebounds and loose balls and played good defense. But no one passed to him for the whole game.

  I could see Dad below in the stands watching the game. At first he was raising his fist and yelling, “Fight, fight, fight,” but then slowly, as the game went on, he fell silent. By the end of the game Dad had settled back and was watching with a fixed grimace. New Trier lost by twenty points.

  As I walked past the bench I heard the coach talking to some other adults who wore black trench coats and had black leather shoes. He was a young coach and I could tell he was intimidated by the well-dressed parents.

  “I just do it based on statistics,” I heard the coach say. “I’ll have to run the numbers and then I’ll make my decision.”

  I knew that Coyle would not be starting after that.

  A few minutes later we all walked out to the car, and as we did I saw the point guard from New Trier walking with his mother.

  “You played so well,” I heard his mother say. “I don’t think anyone played as well as you. A
ll of you are so talented.”

  “Not all of us,” the guard said loudly. “If other people scored, we’d have won. But not everyone played well. Some of us broke under pressure.”

  We were meant to hear this. We all walked on in silence. We all got in the car. Dad slammed the door and said, “Well, you lost.”

  “Yep,” Coyle said.

  “Wasn’t your best game,” Dad said.

  “I would have done better if they’d passed it to me,” Coyle said.

  Dad grimaced and gripped the wheel.

  “Don’t blame anyone else,” Dad said. “You lost. Blame yourself.”

  “I do.”

  “Good,” Dad said. “If you lose it’s your fault. No excuses.”

  Mom turned in her seat.

  “But you played very well. No shame in that.”

  Dad put the car in drive. Coyle looked out the window with a bitter expression, then glanced over and saw I was holding Other Worlds. He grabbed for the book.

  “Stop!” I yelled.

  “Cut it,” Dad said.

  Coyle gave me a murderous look.

  “You’re dead,” he mouthed.

  He reached over to grip my leg. I squirmed away.

  “What is going on now?” Mom said.

  “Willie has something of mine,” Coyle said.

  “It’s not his,” I said. “Coyle tried to hide it from me.”

  “Cut it,” Dad said again. “You lost. No complaining.”

  Coyle glanced over at me like he’d go at me right there. Maddy cringed, waiting for Coyle to leap over her to get at me. Fergus mimicked Dad, saying, “Cut it.” Dad went on driving, the muscle on the side of his cheek tight, a simmering, tense misery bouncing between all of us, the large, bare trees and snow-covered lawns passing by outside the windows.

  * * *

  —

  I think our parents imagined our battles would fade but they were wrong about that. Over that winter Coyle drooled into my food. He held my head underwater in the bathtub. He wrapped a power cord around my neck and said he’d kill me. Twice Coyle hit me hard enough that I was knocked out. In return I put tacks on the ladder to Coyle’s bunk bed. I tore his homework. I hid his textbooks. I once smashed his art project in front of him and just curled up, waiting to be beaten. Mom and Dad tried to rein us in. But they were working all the time, and what can you do when two people living in the same room want to kill each other? Our fights went through half-truces and secret plots of revenge, and then one day in late winter, about a year after Coyle refused to get a haircut, I went up to Dad’s bedroom and opened the cabinet where Dad kept a loaded .22 revolver. We weren’t allowed to touch it, but I knew where it was. I took the gun out. I held it in my hand. I felt its weight. I just sat there looking at it for a while before I put it back.

  * * *

  —

  “Let’s scare her,” Jimmy said.

  “Just have Bennie walk out there. That’ll do it,” Roscoe said.

  “Ha. Ha,” Bennie said.

  I was with Jimmy, Bennie, and Roscoe, my three friends, out in a forest preserve around the backed-up North Branch of the Chicago River. Jimmy, like I said, was our neighbor. Bennie was a gawky, awkward dork who was good in math and was the one who was most protective of our “group.” Roscoe was a good-looking kid who wore a gold chain, had dyslexia, and was pretty much always high, even in the eighth grade. It was a warm day in early spring and we were looking through shrubbery into a clearing where a girl we knew—Harriet Schack—was sitting on a log, holding a cigarette up near her mouth with two upraised fingers.

  “We’ll scare her,” Roscoe said. “And then we’ll try to get her to come with us.”

  We crept forward and two other girls came into view. One was Megan Tivoli, who had a Pat Benatar haircut and whose parents were journalists. The third girl had sandy hair and freckled skin. None of us had ever seen her before.

  “Who’s that?” Bennie asked.

  “We’ll find out,” Roscoe said.

  He held up his fingers.

  “One, two, three…”

  We burst through the shrubs and jumped into the middle of the dirt clearing. Harriet gave a shriek.

  “Oh my God. I thought you were my father.”

  “Hello, Mr. Schack. This is Roscoe Schwartz. Friend of your daughter’s. I was just wondering if she’s allowed to smoke cigarettes.”

  “I would die,” Harriet said.

  “Is that even a cigarette?” I asked.

  “Clove,” Harriet said.

  “Oh. Cloves. Sophisticated,” Roscoe said.

  Roscoe was slicker than the rest of us. He knew how to talk to girls.

  “So, who’s your friend?” Roscoe said.

  “Angela,” Harriet said, introducing the third girl.

  She had green eyes and a flat nose.

  “Hey,” we all said.

  “We have a fort near the water,” Bennie said to Harriet. “Do you want to come?”

  “Only if you beg,” Harriet said.

  Roscoe put his hands up like he was a dog, begging, and then let his hands drop, and in a laconic tone, said, “Come if you want. We have a boat.”

  “Sure, we’ll come,” Megan said. “As long as Bennie doesn’t get weird about it.”

  “No chance of that not happening,” Jimmy said. Bennie’s ineptness with girls was a joke for the entire grade.

  We started off for the fort, the seven of us, walking on the dirt path, down the embankment of a dry creek bed and back up the other side to our fort, which was a piece of plywood over two rocks with a tarp over it. An old wooden dingy with brass eyelets rested in shrubbery. Roscoe and I turned the boat over and dragged it down the dirt embankment and dipped the nose into the water.

  “I like the yacht,” Megan said.

  “Don’t get in it if you don’t like it,” Bennie said indignantly.

  “Try to be cool,” Roscoe said to Bennie.

  I was standing close to Angela, the new girl.

  “Do you want to go?” I asked her.

  “Ok,” she said.

  Bennie and Jimmy glanced at each other. I’d just asked a girl I didn’t know to go on the boat with me. I had never done anything like that in my life.

  “We’ll push you out,” Roscoe said.

  Angela clambered into the boat. I dropped the paddles in the back and pushed so only the back tip was in the water. I climbed in and Roscoe shoved us off and there was a moment where we broke free from the ground and drifted slowly, slowly, through the green water. I fit the oars into the eyelets. I leaned forward, pulling with my whole body, and then pulling again. Within a minute we were far out on the lagoon among the trees and birds. The inlet curved so when we looked back we just saw the stirred trail of water going around the bend. There were no other people in sight.

  “Do you want to try to paddle?” I asked.

  “I don’t know how,” Angela said.

  She had a gentle, measured manner.

  “It’s not hard. You lean forward, cross your arms, then use your back to pull. See?” I showed her a few times and then I said, “You try.”

  We switched places, the boat rocking crazily. I sat facing her.

  “Cross your arms. Use your back,” I said.

  She began to paddle. She picked it up quickly. She went on for a while.

  “You’re good at this,” I said.

  “I like being on a boat,” she said. “It’s away from everything.”

  She stopped paddling and we drifted. It was quiet. Leaves rustled.

  “You’re in the eighth grade?” she asked.

  “I go to Seneca. Where do you go?”

  “Saint Joe,” she said.

  That was the Catholic junior high.

  �
��Will you go to New Trier?”

  “Regina,” she said, which was the girls’ school. “My mom thinks I’m shy and need to be at a small school.”

  “Are you shy?”

  “No,” she said, indignant. “She thinks because I’m quiet that I’m shy. It’s not the same thing. Obviously.”

  “Did you tell her you’re not shy?”

  “She doesn’t believe me. She just thinks I am.”

  “My brother thinks because I don’t do everything exactly the way he says that I’m bad. He blames me for everything in his life.”

  “That’s the way people are. If you aren’t exactly like them they think there’s something wrong with you. My mom thinks that because I don’t talk all the time like her that I’m weird. But I think she’s the one who has the problem.”

  “It’s the same way with my brother,” I said. “He thinks because I don’t do everything his way that there’s something wrong with me. But he’s a bully. If he doesn’t get his way he just goes crazy.”

  We went on like that, talking about our families, complaining about them. I told her a little more about Coyle, and she told me a little more about her mother and sister, who ganged up on her. Angela said that she didn’t fit in with her family and I said it was the same with me. Then Angela started up paddling again, turning us back along the bend in the inlet. We began to hear the sound of the others’ talking. Angela ran up onto the mud bank and we joined the others who were shooting a BB gun at an old pie tin nailed to a tree. We’d only been gone half an hour, but it seemed in that time I’d gotten to know Angela and we had a secret understanding with each other. We clambered off the boat and a minute later the girls walked off on the dirt path, talking low to one another.

  “See you never,” they called.

  That was on a Monday. We met the girls in the lagoon again on Wednesday and then again on the following Saturday. We became after-school friends for that spring. We met in the afternoons in the lagoon in the time after I got out of sports and before dinner. In that group, Angela and I were special friends. Sometimes we walked along the shore together, just the two of us, and she’d tell me about her sister or her mother and how they were loud, abrasive people, and how they thought she was shy and needed special treatment. I told her more about my family, how my father had all those jobs and was trying to get his teaching certificate, and how he was from the Southside and had been in a street gang growing up and how sports and hard work had saved him. I told her how he responded to every obstacle by making lists, by trying to eke out every free moment for self-improvement, and how he’d given up on his own success and put all his hopes in us, his kids. I told about how Coyle had been the perfect kid until one day he came home with a motorcycle and it started a cascade of events that ended with us wanting to kill each other. I made the whole thing into a story, and when I told this story to Angela it seemed to make much more sense than it did in real life, where it was just a vast landscape of mindless drudgery punctuated with violence. It was the beginning of my understanding that these fights with Coyle, my parents’ struggle to live in Seneca, and the feeling of being “the poor kid” in a rich area were the story of my life, and it was what would seem important later.