On the way home, we pedaled side by side. A flock of pelicans passed nearby as they made their low flight toward the sea. We stopped and watched. Malcolm sucked in a gasp of air and his body grew rigid with excitement. The birds were oblivious to everything around them, bent as they were on their single intention, which was to gain the sea. I imagined them as a unit of elite soldiers executing an order, faces set, minds numb to any deterrent. I wondered what Malcolm thought when he watched the birds he loved. Did he imagine himself up there in formation with them, their single-mindedness of a piece with his own? Was he drawn to the sea as they were, as if pulled to it by a spell, knowing that there he could play and survive and no one would hurt him?
“Do it, man,” I said, encouragingly. “Go ahead and do it.” And Malcolm let out a caw that was so exact, so piercingly beautiful that I felt the muscle of my heart tighten inside my chest.
LAUREL WAS HOME BY THE time we arrived.
“What did he eat?” she said, as Malcolm bounded up the trailer steps screeching his uncanny pelican caw. Once inside, he spun around the living room, his arms spread out to either side of him. He knocked a lamp off a table.
“A shake,” I said.
“A milk shake?” she said, incredulous. “With all that sugar? Why would you do that?”
Malcolm spun into one of his book pyramids. A metal ashtray flew off the top and clattered against the wall. Butts and ashes fell to the ground.
“He liked it,” I said, trying to defy the obviousness of my poor judgment. “Why can’t he have things he likes?”
But she was too busy with him to bother with my petty rebellion. I retreated to the opposite side of the room. Laurel waited for the right moment to step in and grab Malcolm, the way girls at the school playground waited to leap into the path of the double Dutch ropes. She reached for his shoulder, but he eluded her. When she finally caught hold of his shirt, she drew him to her and wrapped him in her arms. He squawked and continued to try to twirl, but she had him trapped.
“Let’s have a good hot soak, my little bird,” she said into his hair as she moved him awkwardly toward the bathroom.
“Ares, help out here!”
Reluctantly, I followed. The bathroom was small, and with all three of us in there and Malcolm out of control, I could barely move. As Laurel bent down to run the bathwater, I took a fistful of his T-shirt in my hand. “Arms up,” I said. He grinned and laughed his odd laugh. “Arms up, man,” I said more forcefully.
“Don’t get mad at him,” she said over the sound of water slapping against the tub. “It doesn’t help.”
I finally lifted the shirt over his head then started on his jeans. When I leaned over to get the snap, Malcolm draped his body over my back, making it nearly impossible for me to move. Finally, I managed to yank his pants to his ankles only to realize I’d forgotten to remove his shoes. Frustrated, I pushed him off me, and he toppled backward onto the floor laughing. Laurel shot me a look then went back to filling the tub with bubbles from the plastic bottle topped with an elephant head. While I struggled to untangle the tight knots I had put in Malcolm’s shoelaces that morning, he lay back on the linoleum, thrilled by his nakedness. His hands found his penis.
“Cut it out, man,” I said, pulling off his shoes.
“That’s why it’s there,” Laurel said, reaching under his arms and lifting him up and into the tub.
“Fuck!” I said when the splash wet my shirt and pants.
“That is not helpful,” she said. “And it’s ugly.” Her voice softened as she redirected her attention to Malcolm. “Okay, my love. Want more bubbles?”
I left the bathroom and closed the door behind me. Inside, she struggled to quiet Malcolm, singing “Hush Little Baby.”
“Fuck, shit. Fuck, shit. Cock, piss, motherfucker,” I whispered, savoring the displeasure on my mother’s face when I had sworn a moment earlier, before she’d decided she didn’t have the time or energy to care.
I headed out of the trailer and walked toward the beach. I found a fallen palm frond and dragged it down to the water and sat on it. The sea moved listlessly. A few birds lighted on its surface, floated, then took off again like cars at a drive-through. I remembered when I was four or five, a time before Malcolm. I was a skinny kid with arms and legs thin and rubbery as licorice rope. I would plead with Laurel to take me for a swim in “my ocean.” The sea was my biggest treasure, a jewel as huge as I could imagine the earth to be, its distant shore my unreachable horizon. Now I imagined myself piloting a boat across the sea, away from this place, away from my mother and brother and the minefield of recrimination that I fumbled across daily. When I was a child making this mental journey, the point was not to reach the other side but to battle the fearsome sea creatures and enormous waves that threatened my tiny skiff. But at twelve, I knew it would take no time at all to get across to Desert Shores or Salton Sea Beach. The journey would be eventless, the destination only a mirror of my town. Those boys from Desert Shores? We played them in basketball. Sometimes they won. Sometimes we did.
I dug my hands through the thin, crusty layer of sand at my feet. I thought about Mrs. Poole and how she must really love her son to keep his high-school picture on her desk where everyone could see it. I hoped I wouldn’t get acne. But I thought I probably would since I was a thief and also a trash-talker and there had to be some kind of payback.
When I returned home, Malcolm was already asleep on his couch. Laurel sat at the kitchen table knitting a loose-stitched vest. “He passed out,” she said.
“Sorry about the ice cream.”
“Maybe sugar isn’t such a good idea unless we’re really prepared for the consequences.”
“You told me that before.”
“You probably forgot.”
“I didn’t forget. I remembered it the whole time.”
She looked up from her knitting. “Then why’d you do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were you trying to hurt him?”
I was sure this was the moment: she would say everything right now, accuse me, blame me. My body thrummed with the anticipation of the total obliteration and complete release I would feel when the truth we both labored to hide was finally out in the open. Tears began to form in the corners of my eyes.
“Oh, shoot!” She held her knitting out in front of her, revealing a gaping hole. “I dropped a stitch. Some people know how to fix this kind of mistake…” She put the knitting to her face so that her eye lined up with the gap. “I see you,” she said, and I knew she could see right into my cruel heart.
FIVE
The next day, I woke to the boings and pops of a cartoon seeping into my room through the thin walls. Saturdays were Laurel’s biggest tip days so I was in charge of Malcolm. It was my job to feed him lunch and sometimes dinner, make sure he didn’t get lost in the desert or get fixated on a marble and spend the entire day staring at it. I stayed in bed, hoping he wouldn’t require anything for a while, but through a fuzzy half-sleep, I heard the sharp screech of the trailer door opening and the rude snap of it as it closed on its sprung hinge. I considered letting him go on his own at the same time that I envisioned him getting hit by a car on the highway, his body flying up like a rag doll, or drowning, his head sinking quietly below the surface of the water. I knew that all it took for a life to change irreparably was one moment of nonvigilance, one second of letting go.
When I caught up with him, he was already down by the shore. A dry wind scraped across the surface of the water like a ladle peeling off the skin of milk that formed when Laurel made hot chocolate. I squatted behind a thick stand of cholla cactus so that Malcolm wouldn’t discover me. I was not in the mood to talk and get nothing in return, and I didn’t have the energy for my fantasy games and Malcolm’s passive participation. I felt angry with him. Just once, I would have liked him to look at me like he really knew who I was. When we were together, it was all I could do to convince myself that I existed for him at all and that I was n
ot just some innocuous presence like air or heat. I thought about how he must experience life as a smashed mirror, a collection of fractured pieces that never fit together to make a perfect whole. There was this, and that, and the other thing, and all the separate shards didn’t really have anything to do with one another, not even the central fact that they were in my brother’s brain. How could a person live that way? Most of the ideas that passed through my mind were connected by the idea of me. But did he have such self-regard? I tried to imagine thoughts without an identity to organize them, and I was overcome by the knowledge of how easily he could lose himself since he did not take himself into account. How could he survive except by having someone like me or my mother there to assert that he existed at all, even if it was just to say his name? Even if it was just to touch his arm or pretend to know what he wanted?
From my hiding place, I scanned the lake as far as I could see. There were a few terns and maybe a heron—a lean, tilting thing off in the distance—or perhaps it was just the branch of a submerged tree sticking up out of the lake like the arm of a person calling for help. I knew Malcolm was looking for birds, searching for check marks against the unbroken blue sky. Sometimes he would nod his head when he saw birds coming as if he were an air force general silently counting how many airplanes were returning from a mission and how many he had lost. I wondered if Malcolm used words when he counted, or if he had some private language that symbolized amounts to him, or whether, like his thoughts, there was no augmentation, and all he was doing was counting one, and then one, and then one again. Sometimes when I felt agitated, when I wanted to bang hard enough on the wall of the trailer to make a hole and crawl through it, or when I lay in bed on the nights Laurel was out with Richard, fighting my urge to check the lock on the door one more time, I would try counting. But counting never gave me peace the way it did my brother. It only reminded me how enormous the world was, how impossible to grasp, how unbearably limitless.
Malcolm called out to the sky, summoning the birds. His tight fist of a caw traveled across the water. When he heard a noise coming from behind him, his mouth bent into a smile. The birds were coming to him. But the sound was not bird-song, and as he turned, two boys from the neighborhood appeared. I recognized them: Calvin Epps, who sold pills for his older brother Ronald, and Duane Short. They were high school dropouts who trolled the streets of our town with an air of lazy mischief. They howled at Malcolm and tried to imitate him, but they didn’t sound like birds at all.
“Shit for brains!”
“Ree-tard!”
My stomach twisted and adrenaline flushed my body, but for the first time in my life, I made the decision not to do anything. I felt like a different boy, hovering above my old self. I became light-headed, giddy with the notion that this choice to separate myself from my brother was even possible. I listened as the boys continued to taunt Malcolm, and I grew cold inside because I saw the way in which I would one day leave my family, my guilt, and my responsibility behind me. It would not happen by getting in a car or on a bus, or on a boat as I had once thought. It would have to do with my heart hardening just like it was doing now.
Something altered in the air, and the birds appeared. They flew low across the desert just behind the boys, heading toward the water, their long beaks pointing the way, their wings barely moving. They were carried by wind. I wanted to be carried by wind. I wanted to lift off and float on currents of air impossible to see and be taken away from this moment when I was betraying my brother. Malcolm saw the birds. I willed him to say and do nothing, to be normal enough, just this once, to bore these bored boys. But he was oblivious to their taunts, and as he spread his arms on either side of him, he dipped to the right and wheeled around toward the sea. The pelicans touched down on the surface, lowered their beaks, and slapped their wings restlessly against the water. Malcolm jumped up and down and shook his hands. “Awk!” he cried. “Awk-caw!”
The boys laughed and imitated Malcolm, flapping their arms in spastic exaggeration. The ignorant birds fed gracefully. They groomed themselves, their necks wrapping over their backs like casually tossed scarves. Then, as if by agreement, they lifted off and flew away. Malcolm raised his fist in the air and screamed, announcing their departure.
“Fucking freak!”
Malcolm turned toward the boys, his fist still raised, and made his pelican sound again and again. The boys mimicked him, deforming his bird sounds until they were shapeless, ugly noises. Calvin picked up a small rock and threw it, hitting Malcolm in the leg. When Malcolm did not react, Duane picked up a bigger rock and cocked back his arm. Seeing the look of vicious glee on his face woke something powerful in me, a rage that made me stand up and reveal myself. The sound that rumbled through my chest and the hollow tunnel of my throat felt like a tangible thing, a weapon I could use to kill those boys and everything I hated that lived inside me, too. I roared and ran from my hiding place.
I lost the fight almost as soon as it began. Calvin and Duane rushed me, throwing their fists and feet at me until I fell to the ground. I continued to strike out, kicking them, waving my arms above me. When I connected with Calvin’s groin, the boys grew more serious about the fight. Their mouths hung open. Spit splattered my face. Faggot, bastard, cocksucker, they said, punctuating their words with new assaults. I covered my head with my arms just as a foot landed in my gut. I curled up into a ball.
THE WATER WOKE ME. IT lapped around my feet, soaking my shoes and the bottom half of my pants. I was face-down on the sand. When I rolled over, I felt like a hundred daggers were stabbing me from inside my body. Sand and dirt stuck to my lips and eyelashes. My shirt was ripped, and a bruise below my ribs was already beginning to color. Malcolm lay near me staring peacefully at the sky. The milky foam from the residue of waves lapped around his legs.
“Mal, get out of the water,” I said. I stood slowly. The pain was intense, and I bit my lip trying not to cry out. I hobbled over and helped him to his feet. “You’re soaking wet, man.”
When he took a step, water sloshed inside his canvas sneakers.
“C’mon, Mal,” I said, trying not to breathe too deeply because when I did, my chest felt like it would crack open. “We’ll go home. We’ll dry you off. I’ll make us some bacon.” I pulled him toward me, but he resisted. He leaned over and tried to brush off his pants but had no luck and only succeeded in coating his palms with sand. He wiped his hands on his T-shirt but it didn’t help. I knew what was coming. He started to hum and rock back and forth, holding his hands toward me as if he wanted me to remove them from his body.
“Okay,” I said. “No problem.” I crouched down, bringing him with me, and placed his hands in the sea. The dirt fell away from his skin, swirling into the water in lazy spirals. I washed his hands until they were clean. “You’re okay now,” I said.
Suddenly I was so tired and sore I could not imagine walking back to the trailer, wrestling him into dry clothes, making food. I moved up the beach, sat on a rusted hubcap, and watched the water nudge the shore, depositing something dark on the sand. Malcolm grabbed the object.
“Mom’s not going to let you keep any more crap, man,” I said as he walked toward me with his treasure, although I knew I was wrong. She would praise this piece of garbage like she praised all his finds, as if he had discovered gold. “That’s cool, though,” I said. “Let me see.” I took it in my hand, cried out, and dropped it onto the ground. I heard myself say, “Oh, shit, oh, shit!” and “Fuck, Malcolm. What the fuck?” It was a gun.
Malcolm bent down to take his prize, but I pushed him away. “Don’t touch it.” I said. “Don’t. Just—” I picked up the gun, ran to the shoreline, and hurled it back to the sea.
Malcolm screamed. “Ma, ma, ma!” He ran to the water.
I grabbed him by the waist and held him back. “It’s gone now,” I said, struggling to keep hold of him as he writhed in my arms. “It’s bye-bye.” But I had not thrown the gun far enough, and it came back again like a faithful dog. �
��You can’t have it, Mal,” I said. “It’s bad. I’ll find you something good. A rock, maybe. I’ll get Mom to let you keep it.”
He jabbed his elbow into one of my bruises and I screamed and let go of him. He ran to the shore, but I recovered and pushed in front of him. Splashing through the water, I picked up the gun. I ran up the beach and hurled it into the brush.
“It’s gone,” I said when Malcolm caught up to me. “It was never here.” He made a strangled sound of frustration. “You’ll forget about it,” I said, hoping the gun would be like the stick guns, and bullet casings, and all the things that passed through his mind like vagrants, finding no reason to abide in such a fruitless place. I found a piece of driftwood among the shrubs and handed it to Malcolm. “This is a good one. This is special.” I pointed it into the air and made the firing sound of a gun. “Here,” I said. “We’ll play bank robbers, okay? You be my lookout. You shoot anybody who comes near.”
Still moaning, he took the wood and threw it. It sailed through the air end over end. He ran to retrieve it, cradled it in his arms, and raced for home.
WHEN LAUREL RETURNED FROM WORK, part of me wanted to strip off my shirt and show her the red and purple colored galaxies that covered my torso, to blame her for not being there that day to protect us. But I hid my wounds. I could imagine her taking the matter into her own hands, striding over to Calvin’s trailer and berating him, setting me up for even more trouble. After dinner, she washed Malcolm’s hair. When they were finished, she led him out of the bathroom, dressed him, then sat on a chair, pulling him onto her lap. She dragged a comb through his slick black locks. Malcolm tilted his head back as she drew the comb down. His smile revealed the rose-colored flesh inside of his mouth.
The God of War Page 5