The Little Brother

by Victoria Patterson

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I’ve been arrested.”

  A tingling ran up my neck.

  “Public intoxication,” he said. “I’m at the Cucamonga police station.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “I don’t have my clothes.”

  “Why not? What are you wearing?”

  “They gave me this scratchy jumpsuit. It’s really big on me.”

  In the long silence that followed, I could hear a gardener’s leaf blower in the distance, Gabe’s breathing, and the busy chattering noises of the police station in the background. From the window, a beam of sunlight made the flecks sparkle in the kitchen tiles. I’d detected a note of belligerence in Gabe’s tone and wondered if he was still drunk.

  “What happened?” I asked, perching the phone in the crook of my shoulder, so that I could pour myself a glass of orange juice from the refrigerator. When I’m scared, I get thirsty.

  “I can’t call Mom,” he said.

  “Gabe, what happened?”

  He didn’t tell me, but I found out later from the police report that he was arrested at Ralph’s grocery store near his high school. On a dare, he slid down the aisle in his socks and boxers, his friends recording him on his Samsung camcorder—the same video camera that would get us in so much trouble later. Dad gave it to Gabe for his twelfth birthday. Gabe used it to record his and his friends’ skateboarding feats.

  His friends ran away before the cops arrived, taking Gabe’s clothes with them. Even so, Gabe refused to rat them out. Because Gabe fell and hit his head on the edge of the shelf and, I imagine, because he was drunk and slow, the cops caught him.

  “What should I do? Can you call the clubhouse?”

  “That won’t work,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he admitted.

  “Listen,” I said, “here’s what you do.” I told him about my encounter at the beach with the cop B. Lester, and how once I’d mentioned Dad’s name and his connection to Sheriff Krone, B. Lester dropped the charges and let me go. I hadn’t told anyone about the experience, and it was strange to hear myself speak about it.

  Dad’s influence, I told him, and Krone’s, extended to Cucamonga. “Let them know about Dad.” I said. “It’s our Get Out of Jail Free card.”

  After a strained and confusing silence, he said, “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “The problem,” he said, “is that I’m not a coward. I don’t hide behind my daddy.”

  I was shocked. “You’re drunk,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Now’s not the best time,” I suggested, “for you to be a self-righteous prick.”

  But he wasn’t up for an argument. “I can’t do it,” he said in a hushed, sad voice. “I can’t. It’s so hypocritical. I can’t.”

  “I don’t know why not,” I said. It bothered me to think that Gabe was more principled than me. “You don’t even know what the word ‘hypocritical’ means.”

  “That’s right,” he said, his voice full of hurt sarcasm. “Because I’m not smart like you.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Even and his books,” he added.

  “Sorry,” I said. I didn’t want to encourage him. No one could tease me or poke fun at me like he could.

  “I just can’t,” he said.

  “You’re calling him for help. Isn’t that the same thing?”

  He moaned.

  I took another sip of my orange juice—too pulpy. I couldn’t drink it anymore or even look at it. Cradling the phone again, I took the glass to the sink and poured it out. These dramatic changes in my taste preferences happened all the time during my teens. My favorite foods would unexpectedly disgust me, as if I’d become a different person overnight.

  “I don’t want that kind of help,” he said. “I don’t want to use his name.”

  “It’s the same thing,” I lied, filling another glass with water. “Help is help. There’s no difference. You can’t pick and choose.”

  “Dad wouldn’t do that,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Dad would hate someone who did that. Used him like that. He wouldn’t do it. I want to be my own man. Dad would understand.”

  “Not true,” I said, but he got me wondering. “Dad,” I continued, speaking slowly, “does whatever he has to do.”

  He said nothing.

  “Help is help,” I said. “It’s the same thing. Tell them who Dad is. Let them know.” As I spoke, I remembered B. Lester’s contemptuous look, and I felt a swirl of self-disgust.

  “My head’s bleeding,” he said, changing the subject. “This nice lady cop gave me a towel.”

  “Do you need stitches?”

  “Probably.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d you cut it?”

  “I don’t know. I fell?”

  “You’ve got to tell them about Dad.”

  He was quiet.

  “We’ve got to get you out of there. Think about Mom.”

  “No,” he said. He paused, and then added, “It’s different for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” he said, “it’s different.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re close to him.”

  I laughed. “He’s your dad, too,” I said, and as I spoke, I remembered telling him this before.

  “Not really,” he said, in that same sad, hushed tone. A long pause. “Listen,” he said, “I’m gonna hang up now. There’s nothing you can do to help me anyway.”

  “Gabe, don’t be stupid.”

  A click—he hung up on me.

  I didn’t call our mom, deciding to wait for Dad. When he came home at around four, I apprised him of the situation. All business, he made three phone calls in his study. I watched through the crack in his door, but I couldn’t hear him. He wore golf shorts and ankle socks, and his legs were skinny and bowed. I was unaccustomed to seeing his leg hairs, the same reddish-gold-gray as his head hair, and I noticed a few bruises on his shin. He tapped his cigarette in an ashtray and then left it smoldering there, forgotten.

  As a kid, when I watched him work, his every movement—the way he crossed his legs, held his pen, shuffled his papers—seemed to me to be so smart, deliberate, and important.

  Done with the phone calls, he came back to the dining room table and sat beside me. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes, his face pink. Then he put them back on. “They’ve released him,” he said. “We’ve got a court date in three weeks.”

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked.

  He set his hands on the table. “He’s going to show the judge what a good boy he is,” he said. “Show him a list of all the AA meetings he’ll be going to, offer to do Caltrans work, pick up trash at the side of the freeway, whatever it takes. At best he’ll get this expunged from his record. No one will know the difference. At the very worst, they’ll reduce it to a 415 infraction for disturbing the peace. Either way, he’ll be fine.”

  He lit up a cigarette. A long silence while I watched him smoke.

  “I told him to use your name,” I said.

  He looked surprised. “What do you mean?”

  Another long silence. He stared at me, reaching to tap his ash into his abalone-shell ashtray. He’d gotten it as a souvenir from a trip to Catalina.

  With a sinking feeling, I said, “I told him to let them know who you are, and your connection to Krone.”

  He shifted in his chair. Then he shrugged. “If I’d gotten to him sooner,” he said, “they wouldn’t have booked him.”

  “So that’s okay?” I asked. “I mean, what I told him to do?”

  “If you think so, by all means, yes,” he said sharply. He gave me a heavy-lidded, deep look.

  “Gabe said that you wouldn’t approve.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he pulled the ashtray closer and said, “I can’t figure that boy ou
t. He needs to use his head. Krone does what I want and that’s the whole point.”

  8.

  GABE CONVINCED ME to go with him to his first AA meeting in Newport that weekend. Dad had a schedule directory, and he gave Gabe a slip of paper that his lawyer had created with ten separate corresponding lines for the dates, names, and addresses of the meetings and the signatures of the meetings’ secretaries.

  “When they pass the basket,” Dad instructed, “put this in”—he waved the slip in front of Gabe’s nose—“along with a dollar if you want. You don’t have to give any money, but you do have to put this in. Then after the meeting, someone will sign it and give it back to you. That’s their trick. They make you wait until the end of the meeting, so that you won’t leave. But that’s all you have to do. You don’t have to speak or do anything else. Just get it done. Ten meetings in three weeks should be more than enough.”

  “No way,” Gabe said. “Not ten. Maybe one or two.”

  “Just go,” said Dad.

  We chose a Saturday noon meeting—The Serenity Noon-Timers, it said in the directory—at what was called an Alano Clubhouse, a building within walking distance of Dad’s house, near a shopping center.

  I’d noticed the building before, and that a throng of people seemed to be constantly smoking near it, but hadn’t known what it was, or what the small wooden sign on the front—a circle with a triangle inside—meant. An American flag hung from one of the windows, which wasn’t unusual, since it had been only a little over a year since the September 11 terrorist attacks and there were still American flags everywhere.

  From the outside, it looked like a typical run-down building. The meeting room downstairs had the feel of a small cafeteria, and there was a meeting room upstairs next to a room with a shabby pool table and a bar area that sold sodas, candy, and chips.

  The stairway smelled of cigarettes and mold. “This is ridiculous,” Gabe muttered, as I followed him. Though he looked okay, he gave off a faint odor of alcohol. He’d been partying into the morning with his friends in the garage.

  While Gabe waited, sullen and silent against a wall, I bought a pack of Trident gum at the bar. A TV propped up in a corner showed George W. Bush standing near a group of politicians, smiling and waving, looking like a frat boy, and a zigzag of static worked its way up and down the screen.

  A haggard bleached blond took my money, and after I thanked her, she said, “Aren’t you a sweetheart. So polite!”

  Thinking that it would make us less conspicuous, Gabe and I decided to sit apart from each other in the long, dark room—the chairs were arranged in an oval with a couple of gray couches intermixed—and took great pains not to look in each other’s direction.

  I sat near a pink box of doughnuts, a plate of sliced honeydew melon, and a coffee maker that made regular hissing-sputtering noises until it finished brewing and then, giving one final heave, went silent.

  A man wearing a noisy windbreaker sat in the foldout chair next to me; he was albino-like, with white-blond hair, nearly without eyebrows and eyelashes. We gave each other acknowledging nods, and then he used his thumbnail to create a ridged pattern along the rim of his Styrofoam cup. The squeaky noise bothered me.

  But I didn’t move, because a girl who sat across from me—her hair thick and reddish-brown, and her skin a creamy tan color—entranced me, and I had a good vantage point. Double-take beautiful. She looked hungover, mustering the occasional pained expression and contemptuous glare. She didn’t even pretend to want to be there. She wore cutoff jeans, a tank top, and a leather choker studded with cowry shells. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, and she was all attitude, bored smiles, and heavy-lidded eyes. I did my best not to stare.

  People kept coming into the meeting long after it started, until the chairs and couches were filled, and people sat at the floor, their backs leaning against the couches and walls. Body-builder types, old and young people, businessmen, fake-breasted women, hipsters, freaky-quiet types, chattering attention seekers, and everything in between.

  After some boring, God-centric readings, the sharing began, and hands were raised. Lots of boisterous laughter throughout. Some told crazy and harrowing stories about drinking and drug using, others sounded off about sobriety, and then a young woman began to sob while she spoke about her dead grandmother, but no one stopped her or comforted her.

  I hadn’t witnessed a person so openly expressing emotion before without reprimand or embarrassment. I looked around the room, and most people seemed unfazed, even empathetic.

  A wad of Kleenex got passed—it came to me and I passed it to the next person—until it landed in the woman’s lap.

  “Thank you so much,” she said, looking up and around at all of us with wet and grateful eyes, and then she blew her nose. It was difficult not to be moved.

  After a ten-minute break during which both Gabe and I continued to ignore each other and everyone else, the meeting resumed. The secretary asked which of us were newcomers and a couple of people looked pointedly at me. But otherwise no one bothered me.

  A middle-aged woman whom the secretary called “the chip chick” tried to distribute plastic chips to people, calling out the number of days of sobriety (thirty, sixty, ninety)—with a long, anticipatory pause, as if she were at a game of bingo—but no one took one.

  Then we sang “Happy Birthday” to an old man with a cane who claimed to have four years without drinking. He looked drunk to me, and he sounded drunk, slurring his words as he spoke his thanks, but everyone clapped and hooted for him anyway.

  After that, the meeting became somewhat more serious, though people continued to laugh. They talked of loss and pain and shame.

  At one point, a man who looked not much older than me said that though he loved his family, he’d never felt like he belonged. “Maybe it’s not them, and it’s not their fault,” he said. “Maybe it’s me.” My face heated up and my eyes stung; I felt a lump in my throat.

  I stole a glance at Gabe. His head was thrown back, his mouth was agape, and he was sleeping, his hand with the slip of paper at his knee.

  A basket got passed, and I watched as the two people on either side of Gabe leaned forward to bypass him and let him sleep, passing the basket over his legs.

  The meeting ended with everyone rising and forming a circle and, to my horror, holding hands. The last time I remembered holding hands with a person of my own sex (besides Gabe, when we were kids) was on a kindergarten field trip.

  Styrofoam-cup thumb-etching albino man reached his hand out and I took it, sweaty-palmed, same with the woman in the nurse uniform on my other side.

  Gabe startled awake and looked equally horrified as he realized he had to hold hands with the people next to him. Then everyone recited the Lord’s Prayer.

  My face hot and downcast, I kept silent. This is bullshit, I wanted to say. Having to recite an openly Christian, threatening prayer—deliver us from evil, or else. Death and temptation and trespasses. No, thank you.

  I’d been looking for something specific to hate—probably because of my earlier throat-lumping identification—and felt relieved to have found it, relishing the moment.

  As people shuffled out of the meeting room, Gabe’s eyes met mine in confusion and wonderment. I crossed the room to him and he said, “Fuck, I fell asleep, didn’t get my paper signed. Dad’s gonna be pissed.”

  “Calm down,” I said, taking the paper from him.

  The girl whom I’d been staring at during the meeting looked at us. She was standing near the doorway. I saw that a bit of skin showed between her tank top and her cutoffs. Her head tilted up, acknowledging us. “You on a court card?” she said, her voice deeper than I expected.

  “Yes,” I lied. “Forgot to get it signed.”

  She laughed. “Your first meeting?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “What about you?” she asked Gabe.

  He said nothing, didn’t even look at her.

  But she didn’t let his rudene
ss faze her.

  “C’mon,” she said distractedly, hooking me by the arm, guiding me to the other room, where a group of men were talking by the pool table. She smelled like vanilla. Tapping one of them on the shoulder, she said, “Hey.”

  He turned, smiled, and said, “Hey, baby.” Somewhere in his thirties, he wore khakis and a faded peach-colored polo shirt.

  She nodded at me, saying, “Forgot to get his card signed.”

  “Not a problem,” he said, taking the slip from me. He leaned over the pool table, pulling a pen from his pocket, and while signing the paper he said, “What’d you do last night?”

  “Not much,” she said.

  “You don’t look so good,” he said, looking up at her.

  “Long Island iced teas,” she said.

  “Don’t you know,” he said, handing me the slip, “that something bad always happens with Long Island iced teas?” His eyes grazed past me—“What are you, like, in fifth grade?”—and landed back on her.

  “Long Island iced teas,” one of the other men chimed in, “make me want to fight.”

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “Girl fight,” another man said encouragingly.

  “Or wreck my car,” said the former.

  “What happened last night?” the paper-signer asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s none of your fucking business.”

  The paper-signer said, “What happened to your arm?”

  She outstretched her arm and looked at the three intertwined scratches.

  “Cat?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a cat.”

  “Self-mutilation?” said another, in a tone suggesting he was trying to be helpful.

  “I have to go,” she said listlessly, pulling me away.

  “Okay, Sara,” said the paper-signer. “Will you be at the meeting tomorrow?”

  “Yeah,” she said, not turning around.

  I tried to thank her as we walked back to Gabe but she said, “Not a big deal,” and then she smiled. “See you around,” she said, and she turned and left before Gabe had the chance to be an asshole again.