The Brother Years

by Shannon Burke

  “Watch and learn,” Dad said.

  He slid the trunk into a slot in which it fit perfectly.

  “You kids go to those good schools but I can still teach you something. That’s planning and precision right there.”

  The screen door slammed. Coyle came back out.

  “Is that it?” Dad asked.

  “That’s it,” he said.

  “You don’t have any last little things like your mother would have. Always going back in the house.”

  “I got it all,” Coyle said. “I’m ready.”

  Coyle tossed a small backpack in the front seat.

  Maddy, Fergus, and I were standing there. Dad was grinning, his eyes glassy.

  “Well, we better get going,” he said in a gruff tone.

  “Say goodbye to your brother,” Mom said.

  “Later,” Fergus said, and made as if to punch Coyle.

  Coyle gave him a high five.

  Maddy, imitating Fergus, held her hand up. Coyle gave her a high five. He turned to me.

  “Bye,” he said.

  “Bye,” I said.

  We shook hands. It was awkward. With the others the goodbye was jaunty and affectionate. With me it was constricted and formal. They got a high five. I got a handshake. Mom and Dad noticed this, but pretended they didn’t.

  Mrs. Chambers, our neighbor, was driving by and saw us standing around the parked car. She slowed and rolled her window down and said hopefully, “Are you going somewhere?”

  “Hell, yes, he’s going somewhere!” Dad shouted. “He’s leaving for school. University of Virginia. Full ride!”

  “Full ride!” Fergus mocked at the same time.

  “Congratulations,” Mrs. Chambers said. “Good for you. Good luck.”

  She said it nicely and drove away. Mom turned to us.

  “Your father is very proud of our accomplishments.”

  “Not like he did anything,” Fergus said.

  “I think someday you will have a different opinion,” Mom said.

  Coyle went to the car and started arranging his army duffel into a pillow in the middle seat. He shut the back door and walked to the passenger side.

  “You’re not giving me a hug?” Mom said.

  “I thought I already did,” Coyle said.

  “That was awhile ago. Now you’re saying goodbye.”

  Mom hugged Coyle for about fifteen seconds. Coyle rolled his eyes over her shoulder. Dad opened the driver’s-side door.

  “Enough,” he said.

  Coyle held a hand on the door and, looking away, said to me, “So, I got you a present, Willie. I left it in my room. You’ll see it.”

  “Where’s your present for him?” Dad said. “You didn’t give it last night. I remembered after Coyle left.”

  My eyes slid to Coyle.

  “He already gave it to me,” Coyle said.

  “When did he do that?”

  “He left it for me.”

  “Good,” Dad said. “That’s what I want to hear.”

  Fergus made a snorting sound.

  “Yours is in the room,” Coyle said again.

  He held his hand up. I slapped it. So in the end I got a high five, too, just like Fergus and Maddy. That felt better.

  Coyle got in the car. He took Dad’s keys, which were on the seat, put them in, and turned up the music. Dad got in the driver’s seat and turned off the music and said, “You’re not a college student yet. Don’t touch the radio.”

  “It’s going to be Bob Seger all the way to Virginia,” Fergus said.

  Dad got out and kissed Mom, then got back in the driver’s seat. I just stood there, heart pounding. I told myself I was glad he was leaving and after this I would get my own room and would not have anyone to answer to and not have anyone watching my every move. But I also knew that I’d botched the goodbye. He thought I was sticking it to him in the end and that wasn’t really how I felt. Truly, I didn’t know how I felt, but it wasn’t resentful, and even at that moment I thought I could yell something that would make everything all right and would change the tenor of the goodbye. I could go up to the window and tell him I was sorry. I could apologize for our battles and for pretending I didn’t care he was leaving, and I wanted to say I knew I’d messed up, and I did care, but another part of me knew I wouldn’t say any of this. Not with everyone standing there. And not even if they weren’t standing there, either. There was a counter-pull inside me, and it would be years before I worked it out, and I knew by that point it wouldn’t really matter. The time for a good ending was right then, before the car pulled out of the driveway, while the family and our positions in it were still intact. I ought to have been gracious. We ought to have had an ending fitting for our family, but I’d botched it, and whatever understanding we had arrived at between us, whatever patched-up truce we’d made, that was it. That was all we had.

  The engine had started. Coyle was adjusting the volume, not looking up.

  “Back in three days,” Dad said out the window.

  The car was pulling into the street now. A fluttering panic filled me.

  “So long, suckers,” Coyle called.

  I tried to yell goodbye or good luck, something that would show my good intentions at the very end, but it got caught in my throat and came out a stupid gargled cry. Dad held a fist out the window. The car slipped away. They were gone.

  “Awesome,” Fergus said. “One more year and I get my own room.”

  Mom turned abruptly from us and walked back into the house, hiding tears. Maddy sat on the porch with her head leaned forward and her long blond hair hanging straight down, hiding her face. I knew she was crying, too.

  “What do you care?” Fergus said. “Just one less person to beat on you.”

  “Quiet,” she choked.

  “If you want, I can beat on you double,” Fergus said. “If you miss it so much.”

  Fergus went on to the backyard, swinging a baseball bat. None of us wanted to be around one another. We were always ashamed of any emotion, but particularly sentimentality.

  I went inside. I started upstairs, then remembered that my room was now downstairs. I was getting Coyle’s room. I was now the oldest.

  I walked through the basement to the concrete-walled cell. I stood in the doorway, looking it over. The baseball posters on the wall. The neatly made bed. The bookshelf. The old bats in the corner. I noticed there was an envelope on the pillow and I remembered Coyle had said he’d gotten me a present. I realized he must have put it there when he’d gone back down after I’d brought the trunk up. On the outside of the envelope was the word “WILLIE.” I got nervous seeing my name in Coyle’s handwriting. I thought of all our battles and I figured he’d written a letter to get the last word in. It’s hate mail, I thought. I knew I deserved whatever last thing he’d written. He’d wanted to make it up in the end, to show that the fights and the competition didn’t matter, but I hadn’t been able to go along with the reconciliation and I hadn’t even gotten him a stupid present for his goodbye dinner. So I knew I deserved whatever he wrote. Still, if it was malicious I felt like the framework of my soul would crack. I was exposed and I knew if he slipped the knife in I would close up and not open again for a long time, if ever. The letter will say, So long, idiot. It will say, Fuck off. It will say, Goodbye, loser.

  I stood holding the envelope. I didn’t have the courage to open it. I thought I’d just toss it. But then I’d torn the edge a little. Then a little more. Then I opened it and the keys to Coyle’s motorcycle fell onto the table. The letter read:

  Take care of it. Good luck,

  your brother Coyle

  * * *

  —

  Later that rivalry with my brother and the disagreements inside the family would seem small in comparison to the turmoil of early a
dulthood. I look back on those battles now not with bitterness but with the indulgence one gives to a family eccentricity. With every year my fondness for my family has grown and though I do not forget the early hardships, they seem less important as they are viewed from adulthood. We had our battles, but we were a close family. Not some halfhearted, polite, bloodless thing, but a real family with feuds, hatreds, battles, and love running underneath. We survived and stayed together in our own way. We became ourselves in the fire of our conflicts.

  Epilogue

  All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

  —Maya Angelou

  In a series of developmental studies on the neural cortex a group of kittens were raised entirely in darkness except for an hour every day when they were bound, could not move their heads so they could not see their own bodies, and were shown only vertical lines. This confinement went on for the first twelve weeks of the kittens’ lives, which is the sensitive period for the development of eyesight in felines. After that the cats were let loose on the world and the researchers noticed a strange thing. The cats that had been shown only vertical lines in their youths could see only vertical lines as adults. They’d actually run into the cross-struts of chairs. What they found was that if the cats were not exposed to something while they were young, it was impossible for them to learn or even acknowledge its existence later. I believe that something similar happens on an emotional level in close families. For better and for worse, life afterward is always a version of the family. It becomes the framework for our personality and it is how we are oriented to the world and everything in it. There is no getting away from the family, but to see the pattern, to understand it, to come to terms with it, often the individual has to get outside of it, and leave the family behind.

  * * *

  —

  Mid-July, I was nineteen years old, and I was in a patch of shade on sloped land overlooking a rock quarry in Central Indiana. I had grown six inches my senior year of high school and I was now a lanky, bookish college student. I listened to indie rock. I self-consciously denied interest in anything except literature. I feigned indifference to all physical activities, particularly sports.

  It was the hottest part of the afternoon and I was lying back with Conrad’s Lord Jim propped open on my chest, the white beach spread out beneath me, colored towels laid out near the water and cars parked near the line of trees.

  “Will!” I heard a voice call.

  It was Fergus, far below.

  “Rise and shine. Get up.”

  I sat up to see Fergus at the water’s edge, waving his fist, imitating our father. Maddy had come partway up the path.

  “We’re starting,” she said.

  She was fourteen now and had just finished her freshman year at New Trier. She was a self-assured teenager with a laconic streak, a swimmer, almost six feet tall, with long, chlorine-bleached blond hair. We had called her man-woman and cromagwoman all her life, but other people actually thought she was attractive.

  “Are you doing it?” I asked.

  “Someone has to,” she said. “All his friends backed out. And you know what Coyle will do if it’s canceled. He’ll ruin the day for everyone. You’ll do it, right?”

  “I’m here to please,” I said.

  I brushed dirt from my pants and started down the path toward where the others were waiting on the rock-chip beach. About fifteen of us had driven out to the quarry for the afternoon. Coyle had arranged a competition, but his friends, when they understood what the competition consisted of, had all dropped out. It was up to us, his siblings, to be his challengers and victims in the contest.

  “He’s been talking about it all week,” Maddy said, walking alongside me. “He wanted it to be this big thing, but no one else will do it.”

  “Cause it’s too high,” I said.

  “Of course it’s too high. We just need to pretend to try.”

  On the rock-chip beach there were coolers and blankets and the tinny sound of a radio. Coyle leaned against a pickup truck with his old baseball hat on. He was talking to his summer girlfriend, a matter-of-fact pre-law student. He motioned to me with his beer can.

  “You’re doing it, right?” he called out.

  “I don’t want to,” I said.

  “I love the enthusiasm,” he said. He held a fist up. “If you don’t compete, you have no chance of being…The Champion.”

  Maddy had waded ankle-deep into the water. She was counting the stone sections of the quarry wall with the end of a twig.

  “Ten, eleven, twelve,” she was saying. “Thirteen slabs. Each slab is eight feet.”

  “A hundred and four feet, to be exact,” Fergus said.

  “Too high,” Jimmy said from where he was sitting on a beach towel with his arms around his knees. “Don’t do it.”

  “But if I win I get a prize,” Fergus said in that wide-eyed manner.

  “What’s the prize?” Jimmy said.

  “Probably like a gigantic cash bonanza,” Fergus said.

  Maddy walked from the water and put her shoes on. A few girls we knew from high school sat on their beach towels, watching us. They had heard there was a race to the highest part of the quarry and over the edge.

  “Are you really doing it?” one of the girls asked me.

  She had long, straight hair that went all the way down her back.

  “Apparently, one of us is,” I said.

  “Someone broke his neck jumping from up there last summer,” she said.

  “They must not have been tough like us,” Fergus said.

  The girl whispered to her friend and they both watched us. They knew of our family. Our reputation had grown as we’d gotten older. We were Brennans. We did crazy shit.

  I walked over and put my hand in the water. It was warm on top, but colder when I stirred it. I stepped back, wiping my hand on my pants leg. Fergus took a beer from the cooler and shook the water off. I walked over to where Fergus waited at a line that Jimmy had drawn in the rock chips with his heel. Coyle put on a T-shirt. He was still in good shape, but he didn’t seem to care that much about sports anymore. Coyle was majoring in business and was talking about getting a job in finance. He said if he was going to have to work he might as well make a lot of money. I thought he was becoming just like Dad.

  We stood there, the four of us, lined up on the rock-chip beach.

  “Anyone else want to race?” Coyle yelled.

  A few dim shapes shifted beneath the trees.

  “No one else is stupid enough to do it,” Maddy said.

  Jimmy walked over.

  “Don’t jump,” he said to me.

  “Not like I’ll get the chance to,” I said.

  Coyle’s friends lingered at the edge of the clearing. Some of them still had long hair, but others looked like the kids they’d mocked when they were younger. One of the long-haired guys held up a bottle of Maker’s Mark.

  “Extra bonus prize to whoever wins.”

  “Oh, great,” Maddy said. “Just what I always wanted. A bottle of bourbon.”

  “There’s another prize,” Coyle told her. “Something good.”

  “What is it?” Jimmy asked.

  “A surprise,” Coyle said. He turned to me. “Are you ready?”

  “I’m as ready as I’m going to be,” I said.

  The four of us stood at the starting line. Coyle was to my left side. Fergus was next to him. Maddy was on the far end from me. I was still holding my book. I folded my page over and put it on a beach towel and walked back.


  Coyle handed Jimmy an empty green Heineken bottle. Jimmy held it up in the air.

  “This is for Brennan bragging rights,” Jimmy said. “When the bottle drops, that’s the start. On your marks. Get set—”

  Coyle, Fergus, Maddy, and I were all bent down, poised, ready to race up the steeply sloping side of the quarry. Jimmy dropped the bottle.

  “Go!”

  As he said the word, Fergus pushed Coyle, who fell into me. Coyle grabbed Fergus and all three of us—Coyle, Fergus, and I—ended up on the ground, tangled with one another. Maddy bolted ahead, running free. She had been in training all school year. She was in good shape. She left us all on the white dusty beach.

  Fergus was the first to get up. Coyle tripped him. I held on to Coyle. Fergus wriggled free and was up and running, and then we were all up, the three of us, sprinting across the white beach after Maddy, who had at least a ten-second head start. She reached the steeply sloped hill and started up, clawing her way, entering the pines on a braided dirt path. Fergus reached the path and started after her. Coyle and I, at the same time, broke from the path and started straight up the slope, pulling on tree branches, on shrubs, on weeds, elbowing each other when we got close. I hadn’t cared about the race until it started, but once I started I wanted to win.

  Fergus was a little ahead of us, and when the traversing path crossed in front, Fergus was right there. Coyle reached out and tripped him and climbed over him. Fergus grabbed his leg and Coyle had to shake him off. I scrambled past the two of them and then all three of us were together in a scrum, getting scratched and bruised, pulling one another down, clawing and writhing, making our way through shrubs, thorny bushes, over rocks, going up the steep slope. Maddy had taken the path, which was easier but slower, and as she passed us, her route crossing ours at an angle, Fergus tripped her and pulled himself up and over her. Maddy grabbed his foot as he went over. Coyle ran past both of them. He dodged a stick thrown by Fergus, then was pulling himself up the last incline, clawing his way to the top. Maddy was panting, slowing, disgusted. She had never beaten us in anything, and for a moment she had thought she could win. But once Coyle was ahead she knew none of us would catch him. Fergus and I were clambering up the last bit. Coyle disappeared over the edge.