A Bad Man, So Pretty
Winston got kicked out of military school for smoking dope. He was a big guy, my brother, roped with muscle through his neck and shoulders, but after two months of home cooking in place of barracks’ chow, he started to develop a gut, not really flab, more like a knot of tension, like someone had surgically implanted a volleyball beneath the surface of his skin. He stopped wearing his glasses and refused to try contacts, said it would drive him crazy to have something touching his eyeballs all the time. I think he just wanted an excuse to go around with a Clint Eastwood squint. My brother had always been a little left of normal. Instead of just the regular crew cut, he shaved his head bald for military school—Win never did anything halfway—and his hair grew back in tight crow-black ringlets, like an Afro, when before it had been straight and rawhide brown. He looked only vaguely like the person he had been before.
Marshall Military Institute was a two-hour drive from Mobile, stashed away in the scrub pinewoods of lower Alabama, left over from a time when military school was a more fashionable form of education. It was his third high school in four years, enough moving around that, at twenty years old, he still hadn’t graduated. Win never moaned about getting shipped away, and he never tried to explain himself when they sent him back. There was a boarding school in New England, where he wrote a paper entitled “Banging My English Teacher or What I Think About When I Should Be Thinking About Samuel Clemens.” I don’t think his teacher got past the first line, before Win was booked on the next flight home. Then came this New Age place in Colorado—my mother’s idea—where student problems were discussed in what they called “powwows.” You had to be holding the magic talking stick or something before the group would let you say your piece. Win hated it. It took him almost six months to get rolled. He said they talked you to death out there; they wouldn’t get angry, no matter what you did. That is, until the incident with the laboratory cats. Mom still won’t let us mention it. Win’s biology class had been dissecting stray cats. He broke into the lab and swiped the cats, along with mannequins from the art room, and decorated the campus with them, arranging them in trees, on benches, in the teachers’ lounge. It gave me the creeps to think about, dozens of skinned cats, gray and shriveled, perched in the laps of mannequins, like they were back from the dead. In my imagination, their eyes look the same, the dummies’ and the cats’, flat and vacant as clay.
Dad wasn’t talking about another school anymore. He was riding Win about finding a job. Marshall was a last resort. Win had lasted eight months, his longest stretch of school since he was sixteen, my age. The cadet core was made up of students in serious need of either discipline or toughening up, so it served as a sort of academic detour for wayward and weakling boys.
“The funny thing is nobody got better,” my brother said. “The discipline problems just spent their down time kicking the shit out of the sissy kids.”
He looked at me over the rim of a gurgling bong. He never once offered to get me high. I was the good kid in the family. It wasn’t that I had no mischief in me, but my brother had blazed such a wide trail when it came to getting into trouble, that it was less effort to behave myself than to do something that would have surprised my parents into anger.
“Where’d you get the money for that stuff?” I pointed at his stash, a Ziploc sandwich bag, fat as a dictionary. My brother had no income that I knew about. He just slouched around the basement all day, skimming channels with the remote, looking for boxing on cable. Win was crazy for boxing.
“It doesn’t cost much,” he said, his voice pinched from holding smoke, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “You shouldn’t ask so many questions, Jack. Questions can only lead to answers.”
“What’s that?” I said. “Pothead philosophy?”
He set the bong aside and came toward me in a boxer’s crouch, swinging his torso from side to side, doing a loopy smile. I curled on the couch, folding my knees and ankles in tight to protect the vitals, covering my face with my forearms. He was only kidding around, but I knew from black-eyed experience that serious resistance could lead to trouble. It was better to lie still and take whatever abuse he had in mind. Red-bellies and Indian burns weren’t so bad, compared to when my brother got out of hand.
He poked me in the ribs, tried to slap the underside of my balls with the back of his hand, but his heart wasn’t in it. While he was trying to pry my arms apart, he kicked over the bong, spilling funky water on the carpet. That was just the sort of thing to set him off, and I tensed, waiting for things to get more painful, but they didn’t. He said, “Motherfucker,” and ground the wetness into the shag with his shoe, leaving a damp black footprint. He waved a can of Lysol around, jetting a phony pine scent into the room to cover the mildewy stink. It was a useless gesture. Dad was still so pissed at him, he wouldn’t set foot in the basement if Win was there, unless it was to chew him out. And Mom, she didn’t want to know what was going on. She closed her eyes to unpleasantness, like if she didn’t see it, there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong.
Win’s girlfriend was Camille Crosby. Marshall had recently begun admitting women and Camille was one of only about six female cadets. She went AWOL on Friday nights. Win and I would drive the two hours to get her, me behind the wheel, because Dad didn’t trust my brother with the car. He put me on assignment: Make sure Win stays out of trouble; short of that, keep me posted on whatever sort of mischief he’s making for himself. Don’t let me down, Jack. Win didn’t mind not driving, because it meant he could have both hands free for the bong.
We’d wait around the corner from the guard gate, windows down to let the smoke trail out, until Camille emerged from the dark wall of pines. Sometimes we wouldn’t hear her coming, and she would sneak up beside the car, draw a finger, warm as blood, along my throat, and tell me that I wouldn’t last a minute in the bush. Camille was not the sort of girl I would have imagined for Win—she had biceps like a medium-sized guy and was planning on a career in the military—wasn’t the sort of girl our parents would have liked, sweet and demure and well-mannered. She was pretty, I guess, in a plain way. No makeup, clear blue eyes and good skin. Brown hair, cut short and functional. As soon as she was in the car, she started kissing on my brother. They sat in the backseat and groped each other all the way back to town, misting the glass in their excitement. I had to run the defrost the whole time. When a car going the other direction lit our interior as it passed, I could see Win pushing her shirt up above her breasts, could catch flashes of her flat, milk-white stomach in the rearview mirror.
We’d grab a couple of six-packs and park in the woods on this old logging road near campus. There was an abandoned barn at the end of the road, which Win called their “pigsty of love,” his voice, when he said the words, going cheap and gravelly. The barn was littered with stale hay. The roof sagged. The headlights danced through the open doors, like the beam of a movie projector.
We drank and bullshitted. They got stoned.
“You smoke?” Camille said to me.
“Don’t answer that, Jack. Plead the fifth.”
Win was hunched over the bong, this huge three-footer, like a prop from a reefer movie. Camille was lying on her stomach, chin in her hands. You could tell she felt bad about dragging me along, but I didn’t mind. It beat rented movies and prank calls with my fat friend, Leo. I wasn’t exactly what you would call popular.
She said, “You got a girlfriend?”
“Nope.”
“He’s playing the field,” Win said, winking at me. “Jack’s a lady-killer.”
I fingered bark from a pine tree, getting sap under my nails. My hands, when I sipped my beer, smelled like turpentine. I wanted to think of something interesting to say. In a weird way, I was glad to have my brother back. The house was painfully quiet without him—my parents in front of the television every night, Mom reading a magazine glancing occasionally at the screen, Dad noodling around with work he brought home from the bank. I could hear ice in their
martinis, loud as wind chimes, from all the way back in my room. At least the house was alive with Win in it. He was a strange current, passing through us, connecting us like a wire.
I said, “Did Win ever tell you about his amnesia?”
She shook her head and looked at him. He was blazing up again, sucking bubbles of smoke through the water. He waved his right hand, shaking pain from a scalded thumb. The little nest of marijuana glowed like a heated coil.
“He pretended for three days like he couldn’t remember who we were,” I said. “Like he couldn’t remember anything. He walked around saying shit like ‘This is sure a nice house you’ve got, ma’am.’ Or ‘Excuse me, sir, I just wanted to thank you for taking me in. I feel like I’ve been given a fresh start.’ He was totally nonchalant.”
“Oh my God.” Camille smothered a laugh with her hand. “Tell me you’re kidding?”
“No joke,” I said.
Win raised his eyebrows. “I did that? I’m a funny guy.”
“You’re definitely something,” she said. “I can’t believe they bought it.”
“Mom freaked,” I said. “She took him to a neurologist. Made him look at old photo albums, played his favorite records, the works. Dad was a little skeptical, but Win stuck to his story.”
“How’d they find you out?” she said to Win.
He kept smoking, so I told her the rest. How Win had found me kneeling by my bed, sheets gathered in my hands, praying that my big brother get his memory back. I was ten, Win fourteen. He knuckled my hair. He called me a dumbass, told me it was a scam. Neither of us heard my father at the door.
“Dad went totally psychotic,” I said. “I though he was going to kill us both.”
We turned to Win, waiting for his take on things. He was holding the bong up to his eye, squinting down the tube, as if reading a fortune there. He looked up, did a double take, like he was surprised to find us watching him, and said, “I’m gonna go psychotic, if I can’t get me some of that.”
He pointed at her pants. This was what they came for. They slipped off to one of the rear stalls, far enough away that they thought I couldn’t hear them. But I caught snatches of sound, Win lowing like a wounded cow and Camille’s breathy whines. I sat on the roof of the car, waiting, waiting, the damp and gluey label of my beer bottle peeling away against my palm.
Win told Dad he had a job interview and caught a ride to town with me on my way to school. I don’t know what he did all day, but he was waiting for me when class let out. The parking lot was full of students, boys taking off their ties, shouting to each other over the roofs of cars, girls lighting cigarettes, cranking radios. And there was Win, in the middle of all that blithe music, leaning against the passenger door of my hand-me-down Olds. I can’t say I was glad to see him. He’d been wearing the same clothes every day for a week—a maroon sweatshirt, the hood cinched tight beneath his chin to hide his Afro, filthy camo pants, and Jesus sandals. Here, he was humiliating.
Win was trying to bum a cigarette from Heather Flynn. Heather was known around school for her tits and her nose, both fake. The nose, which had been sort of hawkish, was now arrow-straight with a catty upturn at the end. I’d liked her nose better before, but there was no arguing her chest improvement. This guy, a year older than me, blond with swimmer’s shoulders, was leaning in her passenger window, arms crossed on the door. I was walking with Leo and ducked behind the trunk of a big oak. I didn’t want to be seen with Win. At school, I didn’t have a crazy brother. I told Leo to go on without me, there was something I had to do, and he was blank enough not to be suspicious, like all that extra padding on his head had made him a little dense. He shrugged and said, “See ya,” and ambled on down to the lot, his eyes skimming like water bugs over my brother. I thought I’d wait until the crowd thinned out before going home.
My brother rapped on Heather’s window, smiled, and made a smoking motion with his hand. She gave him a sneer, then went back to the boy. Win tapped the glass, still smiling, and waved. This time the window slid down, and I could see Heather’s lips curling disdainfully around whatever she was saying. She closed the window in his face. The boy rolled his eyes. Win knocked again. I drew myself tight against the tree, pressed my cheek against the trunk until it hurt. I recognized the look on his face.
The boy stalked around the front of the car, Win talking the whole time. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I could imagine his tone. I’d heard him talk like that to our father, his voice slick with malice. Win lowered his hood, his Afro bouncing into place like it was on springs. He gestured toward himself, took a step away from the car. People were watching now, a crowd beginning to gather, and the boy did an unsure look around, sizing up his audience. You could tell he was starting to realize that he’d gotten in over his head, but there was no backing out now. I could feel the bark biting my skin. The boy wound up and popped Win in the face, jacking him back a step, but that was it. He should have pressed his advantage—part of me wished he had—should have stayed on Win, kept hitting him, but he didn’t and, after just a moment’s hesitation, my brother finished the fight. He was crazy with violence, a hurricane burst of fists and knees and head butts. Win had a genius for hurting people. It was over so fast—Win looming over the boy, the boy curled fetally at his ankles—that no one had been able to help. And, now, after what they had just seen, they weren’t about to get involved. I could see Leo gawking, Heather flattening her perfect nose against the glass. Win scanned the crowd—looking for me, I thought—then kissed his peace sign fingers and touched them to Heather’s window.
One time, before military school, Win had snuck out on a school night, come home ugly drunk, and been confronted by our father. Dad asked him who he thought he was, drifting in so late, so tipsy—that’s exactly what he said—worrying his mother half to death. Win thought “tipsy” was hilarious. He cocked his wrists, circled his fists, and did a little shuffle with his feet, Marquis of Queensbury style. He went from room to room breaking dishes, lamps, whatever he could find that would shatter, stopping now and then to shadowbox, his breath huffing through his nose, his fists clenched white, his arms working the air like pistons. He pitched an end table through a plate glass window, jagged shards littering the patio like falling stars. Win pumped his fists in the air, did a victory dance at the sight. He kept yelling this line from Muhammad Ali over and over. “I’m a bad man,” he was shouting. “I’m so pretty.”
Win was big enough that our father couldn’t stop him physically, so Dad quit bellowing, stormed outside, found the axe, and hacked apart the dining room table, the wood splintering with a sickening sound like breaking bone. Win was shocked silent. I hid on the stairs and listened. I could hear my mother crying, her sobs making my stomach edgy, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do for her. She said, “I’m calling Dr. Heller.”
“You’re not calling anybody,” Dad said. “I’ve spent enough money for nothing to discredit every practicing shrink within a hundred miles of here. This isn’t about our son wanting attention. This is about our son being an asshole. Look at Jack. When was the last time you saw Jack break a goddamn window.”
I tensed at the sound of my name. Mom didn’t answer. Dad said, “Jack, I know you’re awake, boy. Come on down here. Right now.”
I stayed where I was. I hated seeing my father like that, his features distorted, his breath coming in ragged gasps. And I couldn’t bear to see my brother cowed. Dad called my name again, and this time I went slinking down the stairs. He said, “Jack, you ever broken a window? In your life, I’m talking about now. Tell the truth.”
“No, sir.”
I glanced at Win. I wanted him to understand that I didn’t have a choice. He was squatting beside the wreckage, a broken table leg across his knees, watching us. The chandelier above the table swung side to side, throwing light around the room, like maybe Dad had caught it on a backswing. Win looked each of us over, one at a time, an odd smile on his lips, like we were strangers, surpri
sing him with an impromptu dramatic performance.
“You’re sure?” Dad said.
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s it, then,” he said, raising his arms, the axe in one hand.
The next day, he did a careful accounting of the damages, excluding the dining room table, and made Win do hard labor around the yard, every day after school and every weekend from nine to five, working him for a dollar an hour, until he earned enough to make restitution. Win had no memory of the incident, but he did the work without complaint. After things had finally gotten quiet that night and my parents were in bed, he staggered back to my room and told me that our father was a good man. I would do myself a favor, he said, if I paid attention and didn’t follow Win’s example, He then proceeded to pass out on the floor beside my bed and wet his pants in his sleep.
I waited until Win had started home on foot before coming out from behind the tree. The parking lot cleared in a hurry. No one wanted to be around if an authority figure showed up asking questions. I found Win a mile or two from school and eased over to the curb so he could get in. When he saw me, he grinned, and I could see the broken edge of his front tooth like a tiny, crumbling tombstone.
“You get that tooth today?” I said.
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