by IGMS
Issue 5 - July 2007
http://www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com
Copyright © 2007 Hatrack River Enterprises
Table of Contents - Issue 5 - July 2007
* * *
We Never Talk About My Brother
by Peter Beagle
Beauty's Folly
by Eugie Foster
Under Janey's Garden
by Margit Elland Schmitt
Rumspringa
by Jason Sanford
When I Kissed the Learned Astronomer
by Jamie Todd Rubin
The Polka Man
by William John Watkins
Original Audrey
by Tammy Brown
The Gold Bug
by Orson Scott Card
Toon Out
by David Lubar
Braces
by David Lubar
InterGalactic Interview With Peter S. Beagle
by Edmund R. Schubert
We Never Talk About My Brother
by Peter S. Beagle
Artwork by Anselmo Alliegro
* * *
Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
-- A. E. Housman
Nobody does anymore, haven't for years -- well, that's why you're here, ain't it, one of those "Where Are They Now" pieces of yours? -- but it's funny, when you think about it. I mean, even after what happened, and all this time, you'd think Willa and I -- Willa's my sister -- you'd think we'd say at least Word One about him now and then. To each other, maybe not to anyone else. But we don't, not ever, even now. Hell, my wife won't talk about Esau, and she'd have more reason than most. Lucky you found me first -- she'd have run you right on out of the house, and she could do it, too. Tell the truth, shame the devil, the only reason I'm sitting here talking to you at all is you having the mother wit to bring along that bottle of Blanton's Single Barrel. Lord, I swear I can not remember the last time I had any of that in the house.
Mind if you record me? No, no, you go ahead on, get your little tape thing going, okay by me. Doesn't make a bit of difference. You're like to think I'm pretty crazy before we're through, one way or another, but that don't make any difference either.
Well, okay then. Let's get started.
Last of the great TV anchormen, my brother, just as big as newsmen ever used to get. Not like today -- too many of them in the game, too much competition, all sort of, I don't know, interchangeable. More and more folks getting the news on their computers, those little earphone gadgets, I don't know what-all. It's just different than it was. Way different. Confess I kind of like it.
But back then, back then, Esau was just a little way south of a movie star. Couldn't walk down the street, go out grocery-shopping, he'd get jumped by a whole mob of his fans, his groupies. Couldn't turn on the TV and not see him on half a dozen channels, broadcasting, or being interviewed, or being a special guest on some show or other. I mean everything from big political stuff to cooking shows, for heaven's sake. My friend Buddy Andreason, we go fishing weekends, us and Kirby Rich, Buddy used to always tease me about it. Point to those little girls on the news, screaming and running after Esau for autographs, and he'd say, "Man, you could get yourself some of that so easy! Just tell them you're his brother, you'll introduce them -- man, they'd be all over you! All over you!"
No, it's not a nickname, that was real. Esau Robbins. Right out of the Bible, the Old Testament, the guy who sold his birthright to his brother for a mess of pottage. Pottage is like soup or stew, something like that. Our Papa was a big Bible reader, and there was ... I don't know, there was stuff that was funny to him that wasn't real funny to anyone else. Like naming me and Esau like he did.
A lot easier to live with Jacob than a funny name like Esau, I guess -- you know, when you're a kid. But I wasn't all that crazy about my name either, tell you the truth, which is why I went with Jake first time anybody ever called me that in school, never looked back. I mean, you think about it now. The Bible Esau's the hunter, the fisherman, the outdoor guy -- okay, maybe not the brightest fellow, not the most mannerly, maybe he cusses too much and spits his tobacco where he shouldn't, but still. And Jacob's the sneaky one, you know? Esau's come home beat and hungry and thirsty, and Jacob tricks him -- face it, Jacob tricks him right out of his inheritance, his whole future, and their mama helps him do it, and God thinks that's righteous, a righteous act. Makes you wonder about some things, don't it?
Did he have a bad time of it growing up, account of his name? 'Bout like you'd expect. I had to fight his battles time to time, if some big fellow was bullyragging him, and my sister Willa did the same, because we were the older ones, and that's just what you do, right? But we didn't see him, you know what I mean? Didn't have any idea who he was, except a nuisance we had to take care of, watch after, keep out of traffic. He's seven years younger than Willa, five years younger than me. Doesn't sound like much now, but when you're a kid it's a lot. He might have been growing up in China, for all we knew about him.
I'm embarrassed to say it flat out, but there's not a lot I really recall about him as a kid, before the whole thing with Donnie Schmidt. I remember Esau loved tomatoes ripe off the vine -- got into trouble every summer, stealing them out of the neighbors' yards -- and he was scared of squirrels, can you believe that? Squirrels, for God's sake. Said they chased him. Oh, and he used to hurt himself a lot, jumping down from higher and higher places -- ladders, trees, sheds and all such. Practicing landing, that was the idea. Practicing landing.
But I surely remember the first time I ever really looked at Esau and thought, wow, what's going on here? Not at school -- in the old Pott Street playground, it was. Donnie Schmidt -- mean kid with red hair and a squinty eye -- Donnie had Esau down on his back, and was just beating him like a rug. Bloody nose, big purple shiner already coming up ... I came running all the way across the playground, Willa too, and I got Donnie by the neck and hauled him right off my brother. Whopped him a couple of times too, I don't mind telling you. He was a nasty one, Donnie Schmidt.
Esau had quit fighting, but he didn't bounce up right away, and I wouldn't have neither, the whupping he'd taken. He was just staring at Donnie, and his eyes had gone really pale, both of them, and he pointed straight at Donnie -- looked funny, I'm bound to say, with him still lying flat down in that red-clay mud -- and he kind of whispered, "You got run over." Hadn't been as close as I was, I'd never have heard him.
"You got run over." Like that -- like it had already happened, you see? Exactly -- like he was reading the news. You got it.
Okay. Now. This is what's important. This is where you're going to start wondering whether you should have maybe sat just a little closer to the door. See, what happened to Donnie, didn't happen then -- it had already happened a week before. Seriously. Donnie, he didn't disappear, blink out of sight, right when Esau said those words. He just shrugged and walked away, and Willa took Esau home to clean him up, and I got into a one-o-cat game -- what you probably call "horse" or "catcher-flies-up" -- with a couple of my pals until dinnertime. And Ma yelled some at Esau for getting into a fight, but nobody else thought anything more about it, then or ever. Nobody except me.
Because when I woke up next morning, everybody in town knew Donnie Schmidt had been dead for a week. Hell, we'd all been to the funeral.
I didn't see it happen, but Willa did -- or that's what she thought, anyway. Donnie'd been walking to school, and old Mack Moffett's car went out of control somehow, crossed three lanes in two, three seconds, and pinned him against the wall of
a house. Poor kid never knew what hit him, and neither did anyone who ever went over the car or gave poor Mack a sobriety test. The old man died a couple of months later, by the way. Call it shock, call it a broken heart, if you like -- I don't know.
But the point is. The point is that Donnie Schmidt was alive as could be the day before, beating up on Esau on the playground. I remembered that. But I'd also swear on a stack of Bibles that he'd been killed in an accident the week before, and Willa would swear on the Day of Judgment that she was there. And we'd both pass any and every lie-detector test you want to put us through. Because we know, we know we're telling the truth, so it's not a lie. Right?
It's just not true.
Told you. Told you you'd be looking at me like that about now ... no, don't say nothing, just listen, okay? There's more.
Now I got no idea if that was the first time he did it -- made something happen by saying it already had. No idea. Like I said before, it was just the first time I ever really saw my brother.
Nor it didn't change a lot between us, him and Willa and me. Willa was all books and choir rehearsals, and I was all cars and trucks and hunting with my Uncle Rick, and Esau pretty much got along on his own, same as he'd always done. He was just Esau, bony as a clothes rack, all elbows and knees -- Papa used to say that he was so thin you could shave with him -- but if you looked closely, I guess you could have seen how he might yet turn out goodlooking. Only we weren't looking closely, none of us were, not even me. Not even after Donnie. One of anything is still just one of anything, even if it's strange. You can put it out of your mind. So across the dinner table was about it for Willa and me. If we were home.
But while I wasn't really looking, I can't say I didn't pay a little more attention in the looking I did, if you know what I mean.
One time I do recall, when Esau was maybe twelve, maybe thirteen, in there somewhere. Must have been thirteen, because I was already out of high school and working five days a week to help with the rent. Anyway I'm up on the roof of the house on a Saturday, replacing a few shingles got blown off in the last windstorm. Hammering and humming, not thinking about much of anything, and suddenly I turn my head and there's Esau, a few feet away, squatting on his heels and watching me. Never heard him climbing up, no idea how long he's been there, but I know I don't like that look -- sets me to thinking about the one he gave Donnie. What if he says to me, "You fell off the roof," and it turns out I'm dead, and been dead some while? So I say "Hey, you want to hand me those nails over there?" friendly and peaceable as you like. Probably the most I've said to him in a week, more.
So he hands me the nails, and I say thanks, and I go back to work. And Esau sits watching me a few minutes more, and then he asks, right out of nowhere, "Jake, you believe in God?"
Like that. I didn't even look up, just grunted, "Guess I do."
"You think God's nice?"
His voice was still breaking, I recall -- went up and down like a seesaw, made me laugh. I said, "Minister says so."
He wouldn't quit on it, wouldn't let up. "But do you think God's nice?"
I dropped a couple of shingles, and made him go down and bring them back up to the roof for me. When he'd done that, I said, "You look around at this world, you think God's nice?"
He didn't answer for a while, just sat there watching me work. By and by he said, "If I was God, I'd be nice."
I set my eye on him then, and I don't know what made me do it, but I said, "You would, huh? Tell it to Donnie Schmidt."
I'd never said anything like that to him before. I'd never mentioned Donnie Schmidt since the funeral, because I knew in my mind -- like Willa, like everyone else -- that Donnie was dead and buried a week before him and Esau had that fight. Anyway, Esau's eyes filled up, which hardly ever happened, he wasn't ever a crier, and his face got all red, and he stood up, and for a minute I thought he actually was about to come at me. But he didn't -- he just screamed, with that funny breaking voice, "I would be a nice God! I would!"
And he was off and gone, I guess down the ladder, though maybe he jumped, the way he was doing then, because he was limping a bit at dinnertime. Anyway, we never talked about God no more, nor about Donnie Schmidt neither, at least while Esau still lived here.
I never talked about any of this with Papa. He was pretty much taken up with his Bible and his notions and his work at the tannery, before he passed. But Ma saw more than she let on. One time ... there was this one time she was still up when I come home from little Sadie Morrison's place, she as later married that Canuck fellow, Rene Arceneaux, and she said -- that's Ma, not Sadie -- she said to me, "Jacob, Esau's bad."
I said, "Ma, goodness' sake, don't say that. There's nothing wrong with the kid except he's kind of a pain in the ass. Otherwise I got no quarrel with him." Which was true enough then, and maybe still is, depending how you measure.
Ma shook her head. I remember, she was sitting right where you are, by the fireplace -- this was their house, you know -- just rocking and shelling peas -- and she said, "Jacob, I ain't nearly as silly as everybody always thinks I am. I know when somebody's bad. Esau, he makes people into ghosts."
I looked at her. I said, "Ma. Ma, don't you never go round saying stuff like that, they'll put you away for sure. You're saying Esau kills people, and he never killed nobody!" And I believed it, you see, absolutely, even though I also knew better.
And Ma ... Ma, whatever she knew, maybe she knew it because she was just as silly as folks thought she was. Hard to say about Ma. She said, "That girl last year, the one he was so gone on, who wanted to go off to New York to be an actress. You remember her?"
"Susie Harkin," I said. "Sure I remember. Plane crashed, killed everybody on board. It was real sad."
Ma didn't say nothing for a long time. Rocked and shelled, rocked and shelled. I stood and watched her, snatching myself a pea now and then, and thinking on how wearied she was getting to look. Then she said, almost mumbling-like, "I don't think so, Jacob. I'm persuaded she got killed in that crash, but I don't think so."
That's exactly how she put it -- exactly. I didn't say anything myself, because what could I say -- Ma, you're right, I remember it both ways too? I remember you telling me she gave him the mitten -- that's the way Ma talks; she meant the girl broke up with him -- and left, and I remember Susie doing just fine up there in the city, she even sent me a letter ... but I also remember her and Esau talking about getting married someday, only then she stepped on that flight and never got to New York at all ... I'm going to tell Ma that, and get her going, when the city health people already thought she ought to be off in some facility somewhere? Not hardly.
Things wandered along, way they do, just happening and not happening. Willa went all the way on to state college and become a teacher, and then she got married and moved all that way to Florida, Jacksonville Beach. Got two nice kids, my niece Carol Ann and my nephew Ben. Ma finally did have to go away, and soon enough she passed too. Me, I kept on at the same hardware store where you found me, only after a while I came to own it -- me and the bank. Married Middy Jo Staines, but she died. No children.
And Esau ... well, he graduated the town high school like me and Willa -- unless maybe we just think he did -- and then the University of Colorado gave him a scholarship, unless they just think so, and he was gone out of here quicker than scat. Never really came home after that, except the once, which I'll get to in a bit. Got through college, got the job with that station in Baltimore, and the next time we saw him he was on the air, feeding stories to the network, the way they do -- like, "And here's Esau Robbins, our Baltimore correspondent to tell you more about today's tragic explosion," or whatever. And pretty soon it was D.C. and the national news, every night, and you look up and your baby brother's famous. Couldn't have been over thirty.
And looking good, too, no question about it. Grew up taller than me, taller than Papa, with Ma's dark hair and dark blue eyes, and that look -- like he belonged right where he was, telling you things he knows that you d
on't, and telling them in that deep, warm, friendly voice he had. Lord, I don't know where he rented that voice -- he sure didn't have it when he lived in this town. Voice like that, he could have been reciting Mother Goose or something, wouldn't have mattered. When you heard it you just wanted to listen.
I used to watch him on the TV, my brother Esau, telling us what's really doing in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in France, in D.C., and I'd look at his eyes, and I'd wonder if he ever even thought about poor, nasty Donnie Schmidt. And I'd wonder how he found out he could do it, how'd he discover his talent, his knack, whatever you want to call it. I mean, how does a little boy, schoolyard-age boy -- how does he deal with a thing like that? How does he even practice it, predicting something he wants to happen -- and then, like that, it's true, and it's always been true, it's just a plain fact, like gravity or something, with nobody knowing any better for sure but me? Town like this, there's not a lot of people you can talk to about that kind of thing. Must of made him feel even more alone, you know?
The visit. Whoo. Yeah, well -- all right. All right.
It wasn't hardly a real visit, first off. See, he'd already been the anchorman on that big news program for at least ten, twelve years when they got the notion to do a show on his return to the old home town. So they sent a whole crowd along with him -- a camera crew, and a couple of producers, the way they do, and there was a writer, and some publicity people, and some other folks I can't recall. Anyway, I'll tell you, it was for sure the biggest thing to hit this place since Ruth and Gehrig barnstormed through here back in the Twenties. They were here a whole week, that gang, and they spent a lot of money, and made all the businesses happy. Can't beat that with a stick, can you?
And Esau walked through it all like a king -- just like a king, no other word for it. They filmed him greeting old friends, talking with his old teachers, stopping in at all his old hangouts, even reading to kids at the library. Mind you, I don't remember him ever having any hangouts, and the teachers didn't seem to remember him much at all. As for the old friends ... look, if Esau had any friends when we were all kids, I swear I don't recall them. I mean, there they were in this documentary thing, shaking his hand, slapping his back, having a beer with him in Henry's -- been there fifty, sixty years, that place -- but I'd never seen any of them with him as a kid, 'ceptin maybe a few of them were pounding on him, back before Donnie. Thing is, I don't imagine Esau was trying very hard to get the details right. Wouldn't have hardly thought we was worth the trouble. Willa thought she recognized one or two, and remembered this and that, but even she wasn't sure.