The Brother Years

by Shannon Burke

  I saw Angela eight or ten times that spring. We didn’t go out. We didn’t kiss. I never held her hand. I was way too self-conscious for anything like that. But we were friends. And telling those stories to her clarified them in my mind and elevated the growing feeling of defiance inside me. It made it less likely that I’d accept Coyle’s demands. Whatever happened, I knew I wouldn’t go on taking it.

  * * *

  —

  In May of 1980, three months before I started high school, on a clear, warm, spring day, I was raking in the backyard, gathering the cut grass into lumpy piles. We didn’t have a bag for our mower, so after our father cut the grass, Coyle and I had to rake up. Coyle was annoyed at the inept way I raked, thinking he went faster than me and was doing more work, which was true. He shoved me, saying, “Rake faster.” I did speed up, but raked near his motorcycle to show that if I went faster I might scratch his bike.

  “Don’t touch my bike with the rake,” Coyle said. And because he said that, I raked even closer to his bike and one of the tines of the rake grazed the tire of his bike. Coyle was waiting for this act of defiance, and as soon as the rake grazed the rubber, Coyle stepped over and pushed me from behind. I scrambled up and pushed his bike, which tottered, then fell over, the side mirror shattering as it hit the brick edge of the garden. For a moment we stood there, stunned.

  “You broke it.”

  “It’s just the mirror,” I said, backing up.

  “You hurt my bike,” Coyle said.

  And then Coyle was on me, gripping me in two shaking fists. He flung me to the side. I landed, rolling, and was trying to scramble up when there was a white explosion in my chest, a blossoming of blinding pain. I’d been kicked.

  “Don’t.”

  He kicked me again.

  “Touch.”

  He kicked again.

  “My bike.”

  Coyle pulled his foot back again but I crawled free, gasping. I got up. I staggered to the rake. I turned, swinging. Coyle blocked the rake with his one hand and held his other hand high. He smacked me, hard, across the face. A part of my mind was knocked far away, a kind of narrowing stillness spreading inside. Distantly, I heard myself screaming, but inside a part of me was calm and certain. We had been coming to that point for a long time and I knew what I would do.

  Coyle held his hand up and—smack, smack—he hit me twice. Then he stood away. I fell. I got up and limped across the grass with him walking after me, laughing.

  “Can’t get away,” he called.

  I got into the house and shut the back door. I locked it, but Coyle was already going around to the side. He knew I couldn’t lock all the doors before he got in. I ran up the stairs to Mom and Dad’s room and jerked Dad’s cabinet open, breaking the lock. I could see the .22 pistol at the back. I grabbed it. Coyle was coming up the stairs. I took the pistol and hid behind the open door to Dad’s bedroom. Coyle went into our bedroom, thinking I’d hidden in there. I slipped out behind him and ran down the stairs, holding the gun. Coyle came after me.

  “Can’t get away,” he called again.

  I burst out the back door and jumped down the porch stairs. Coyle was right behind me. I curved off into the Chambers’ yard. Coyle grabbed my shirt and I turned, swinging with the gun, pulling the trigger. The gun hit Coyle’s head and fired. Coyle’s head jerked to the side in a crazy way. He fell and lay motionless in the grass. There was a little blood near his head, not that much at first. I waited for Coyle to get up. He didn’t. I could hear a lawnmower somewhere far away. I could smell cut grass. I could smell gunpowder. The sound of the shot was loud in my ears. I waited for Coyle to get up. His right leg was folded beneath his body. He still wasn’t moving.

  The neighbors’ back door opened. Mrs. Chambers came out. She was wearing a white tennis outfit.

  “I called an ambulance!” she said.

  “What for?” I said nervously.

  “You’ve killed your brother and you say what for? He says what’s the ambulance for!” she shouted to the neighbors. “They’ve finally done it. One of them’s dead. He shot his brother. Dead!” She danced around in her tennis outfit, screaming. “Now he’s dead! They’ve killed each other! Dead! In my yard!” She threw her tennis racket out into the grass. “Dead!” she shrieked, doing a hysterical dance over Coyle.

  “He’s waking up,” I said.

  Coyle had started groaning weakly. I backed up.

  “You could help instead of going crazy,” I said.

  “He says I’m going crazy. I am. And he just killed his brother. There he is. Dead!”

  The gun was resting in the grass. I picked it up and walked slowly back into our yard. I stopped once I was on our property. I looked back. Then I walked to our porch and sat. I set the gun down beside me on the wooden step. I pretended I had nothing to do with what was going on over in Mrs. Chambers’ yard.

  I saw Coyle’s legs move. Then he sat up slowly with wide, dazed eyes. Blood streamed down his face. Mrs. Chambers bent to him. He pushed her away.

  “Oh my God! I’m being assaulted in my own yard!”

  Coyle sat in the grass, gazing off at nothing. His eyes looked big and wide and puzzled. The blood was very red against his pale skin. His blondish-brown hair was soaking up the blood. The tips of his hair dripped blood. There were sirens far away, then close, then they stopped. I heard men calling to one another. I just sat on the porch, watching. Firemen in uniforms hurried past me. After a moment the screen door opened and smacked shut. Fergus walked out. He’d just gotten home with Mom. He didn’t know what the firemen were there for, but he figured it must be some entertaining fuckup. He was grinning until he saw Coyle.

  “What happened?”

  “I hit Coyle with Dad’s gun. It went off.”

  The blood was flowing from the side of Coyle’s head. His hair was clotted with it. Maddy had come up behind Fergus at the screen door.

  “What happened to Coyle?” she said in a quavering voice.

  “Nothing. He’s fine,” I said.

  “Yeah, he’s fine,” Fergus said. “Willie shot him and that’s fine with Willie.”

  Mom had come up to the screen door as Fergus spoke. She saw the firemen. She saw Coyle in the grass with blood down his shirt and me with that gun.

  “Willie shot Coyle,” Fergus said cheerfully.

  “Oh my God!” Mom shrieked.

  She ran into the backyard. One of the firemen hurried out to her, waving his arms. She listened to what the fireman had to say and I saw her expression change. Coyle was trying to stand up now. She turned and glared at Fergus.

  “Gotcha,” he yelled, but I’m not sure he knew what was happening, either.

  The gun was still on the porch step. Fergus gave me a look like I was an idiot. He took the gun and slid it under the porch.

  “Go somewhere else,” Fergus said to me.

  I stood to go inside but two policemen had arrived. One of the cops looked back at us and walked over. I sat back down.

  “Are you the brother?” the cop asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “He’s the bad brother,” Fergus said.

  “Get up,” the cop said.

  I got up. The cop took me behind the neck and led me away.

  * * *

  —

  I still have a copy of my mug shot. I was fourteen years old, five-foot-three, and under a hundred pounds. I look like I’m about ten years old in that photograph, but my expression is absolutely defiant and unrepentant. In my mind, Coyle had been beating on me a few times a day for more than a year and however I protected myself was justified.

  At the station, the police did not put me inside a cell, but handcuffed me to a bar along the wall. I sat on a bench, leaning my head against the wall, not impatient, not even that unhappy. Even if I went to prison, I thou
ght, it couldn’t be any worse than what I’d been living through. And I was glad for what I’d done.

  After a while a detective came over and sat next to me. I told him that Coyle was coming after me and I took the gun to protect myself. I said that the gun went off accidentally when it hit his head. There was no way they could prove that wasn’t true. I said Coyle and I had never gotten along. I said I thought Coyle was going to kill me. The detective didn’t believe this last part, but when I pulled my shirt up he saw bruises all over my body. When he raised his hand I flinched instinctively. All of this changed the way the officers treated me. I was still arrested, but they were gentler after that. They never put me in a cell. They had a long talk with my mother and father that afternoon at the station.

  Hours later, when I heard that the gun had only gone off alongside Coyle’s head and added force to the blow, giving him a concussion, but that I hadn’t actually shot him, I was charged with battery and released on two hundred dollars’ bail until my court date, when my official punishment would be decided. My unofficial punishment, what I thought of as my real one, was decided the next day in the kitchen with my mother.

  * * *

  —

  Our father was the domineering, churning, chaotic engine of our lives, but Mom was the one who kept the house running and was also the one who, if not deciding the punishments, was definitely the one implementing them. If Dad grounded us for a month in a moment of anger, it was Mom who made sure we stayed inside. If Dad said no dessert for two weeks, it was Mom who refused to serve the dessert. Dad was the one with the temper. Mom was the one with steadiness and grit.

  Mom had grown up on the seventeenth hole of the Kenwood Country Club in Cincinnati. Her own mother, a Finn from Astoria, was a flirty, gossipy, middle-class socialite and a bad drunk who pretty much hit rock bottom when Mom entered her teens. Mom’s father was a traveling salesman for Procter & Gamble who was away a lot of the time, and so when her mother went on her five-year drinking binge it was our mother who took over the duties of the house and cooked and cleaned for her two brothers while still getting A’s at the convent school. This experience of essentially becoming a mother as a teenager burnt some of the joy out of her and taught her early on that life was a series of trials and hardships and the only lessons that really mattered were those that taught endurance and discipline.

  When Mom turned eighteen she escaped to Northwestern and met my father, a confident, swaggering, ball-playing city kid on scholarship, an upbeat dreamer who thought that hard work could accomplish anything. Dad’s optimism and exuberance, his boisterousness and athleticism, must have been a bright light shining on Mom’s bleak, alcohol-soaked childhood. But Mom didn’t yet know about Dad’s baseline impracticality about money, or his temper, and at some point in our youth she must have understood that she’d traded being a mother at the age of fifteen, while her own mother lolled drunk in her bathrobe, for keeping house for an impractical workaholic with a bad temper and a dreamy sense of finances. But by the time she understood this she had four kids and hopeless debt and lived in a tiny rented house in a fancy suburb they couldn’t afford and the only way out of the situation was through it.

  At the police station, when she came to pick me up, Mom signed the forms without looking at me. It wasn’t until we were back home in the kitchen that Mom said, “Sit. We need to talk, Willie.”

  The kitchen was a small room with the refrigerator in a nook near the back door and an old gas stove with black knobs. The table had a bench on one side, which I sat on. Mom rinsed a plate and set it in the dishwasher. She leaned against the sink and began to dry her hands slowly with a dish towel.

  “You understand that you can’t ever use a weapon against your brother again, don’t you?” she said.

  “I’ll use a weapon again if I think he’s going to kill me,” I said. I was determined not to give an inch. “Have you seen the bruises on my body?” I said.

  “I saw your bruises. And his.”

  “He kicked me as hard as he could three times.”

  “And you damaged his motorcycle, which you know he’s very protective of.”

  “He was trying to kill me.”

  Mom gave me a skeptical look.

  “If you had those worries you should have come to us.”

  “I did!” I said. “A lot of times. And you said to shut up and stop complaining. And Dad said to learn to defend myself, which I did, so you should be happy.”

  “Your father did not tell you to pick up a weapon against your brother. He explicitly forbid it. You know that. No weapons. You understand that, right?”

  “I guess,” I said faintly.

  “Good. That’s settled. No weapons.” She paused for a moment, then added, “But I also want you to understand that your father and I see your side of this.”

  I was surprised. I waited.

  “Your brother has a very determined personality and has begun to associate with an unfortunate group of friends. Coyle is larger and stronger than you and he takes his frustration out on you. Don’t think we don’t see this.”

  I was quiet.

  “We don’t know how it’s gotten to the point it’s at now, but we want you to know that we are taking care of the situation. The violence in this house is going to stop. On his side, and on yours. If you have a problem with your brother from now on, you will talk to us.”

  I was momentarily flooded with relief, but then something else rose up inside, something dark and defiant. I let out a disparaging puff of air.

  “As if talking’s going to help. I wake up in the morning and I get beaten on. I come home from school and he hits me. And if I bring it up I’m beaten on even more. By Coyle and by Dad.”

  “Your father does not hit you,” Mom said in a wounded, piping tone.

  I heard Fergus laugh loudly from the other room.

  “Fergus. Go away!” Mom yelled.

  Fergus might have moved a little, but not so far that he couldn’t hear. That fight with the gun was the most exciting thing to happen in the house in years.

  “What’s going to happen if I tell on Coyle every time he hits me?” I said. “You’ll get sick of it. You’ll just say it’s both our faults and that I need to do my work and as soon as we’re alone Coyle will beat on me again. That’s why I picked up a gun in the first place. It was the only way to get you to take it seriously.”

  “We are taking this seriously because of an accumulation of evidence.”

  “You’re taking this seriously because I pulled a gun and embarrassed everyone.”

  Mom took a deep breath and spoke in a tense, cold, utterly patient manner.

  “I brought you in here because I want you to know that if you are articulate about a problem, words are more effective than violence.”

  I laughed derisively.

  “Words and violence maybe,” I said. “I know the truth. You speak up in our family and you get beaten on. You speak up, you get called a complainer and an exaggerator and told you have to shut up until sometime in the future when everything is supposedly going to be perfect. That’s what we’ve been told all our lives: Shut up and be good because we’re lucky to be here in glorious Seneca. I tried to tell you before that I was getting beaten on. But you didn’t want to hear it.”

  “What you say is a warped version of the events.”

  “It’s the only real version,” I said. “Coyle blames me for things that are his own fault. And you and Dad are so worked up about making us ‘superior human beings’ that you don’t stop to consider what it’s like in the house.”

  “Untrue,” Mom said in a faint, quavery voice. “I do consider it. Your father and I spend hours considering every aspect of your upbringing. We are committed to working so you children grow up in a different way than we did. Whatever happens next month in court, take your punishment, but know there has been
a resolution here, because we are talking this over together and are living in a safe house.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for telling me.”

  She had spoken earnestly. That stung her.

  “Sarcasm is not helpful,” she said.

  “Nothing is helpful except threats and violence,” I said. “Just like you learned growing up that lazy people take advantage of everyone else, I’ve learned that violence is necessary against bullies. That’s the main lesson of my life. Whatever you say, I know I’ll be hit again. I know Coyle will blame me for everything that goes wrong with him. And I know you can’t protect me and I’ll never be safe until I’m away from Coyle and this house. Sarcasm may not be helpful. But at least with sarcasm I’m saying what’s true.”

  “You’ve always had the right to speak up,” she said.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Why don’t you call me a complainer for saying this now?”

  Mom stood with her lips trembling. I suppose she thought she’d given us a happy childhood. All her work to live in the safe suburbs, with the good schools, all her cooking and cleaning and slaving away eighteen hours a day, like her drunken mother had never done for her. She had thought she’d call me in there and I’d acknowledge her contribution and be grateful for the measured way we were discussing the situation, but instead of grateful recognition she had a spiteful monster snapping at her from across the kitchen table. It was hard to trace back how it had come to that, how their dreams of self-improvement had devolved to that point of utter acrimony, but the damage was done. I had gotten beaten too many times and no half-hour conversation was going to change that. She had good intentions, but her intentions didn’t matter to me. I was caught in a system where I got the shit kicked out of me and she was part of that system and she hadn’t protected me.