Corky's Brother

by Jay Neugeboren

  I went into his room with him and sat down in a chair next to his desk. “Jesus!” he said a few times, and pounded his fist into his palm. Then he paced the room and when he came by me he patted me on the shoulder, as if he were trying to cheer me up, to make me feel good. “You’re okay, Howie,” he said. After a while he sat down and took some deep breaths. “Jesus,” he said. “It’s hard to believe, you know what I mean?” I said I did, and I meant it. I could still picture Mel—the way he looked in the newspapers, but more the way he looked when I’d seen him play stickball, the way he’d smile when he whipped the bat around. He was a lefty and swung on a line like Ted Williams, with a really graceful swing. Corky started to unwind then, talking about things he and Mel had done together and about how it seemed impossible that they wouldn’t do them again, but the fact that Mel was gone just didn’t seem real to him. Not until he went to the closet to show me some stuff. He took out picture albums of Mel he’d collected and some baseball caps from teams Mel had been on, an old baseball glove that he’d given to Corky, a pair of spikes. “See these?” he said, showing me the spikes. The black leather was crusted and cracked from dirt and the shoelaces had been broken and retied in five or six places. “They didn’t belong to Mel,” he said. “They were mine. Do you understand? Remember last year when we changed the name of our team to The Zodiacs and started getting more games and things? I got these then. Mel bought ’em for me. When he was back from the Dodgers’ training camp in Florida just after spring training—before he got sent to Fort Worth—he bought ’em for me and when he gave them to me he said—he said it was about time I stopped using his hand-me-down’s, that I was on my own and he—” And then Corky just started blubbering. The tears came rolling down his face. He stood there holding the shoes next to his face, dirty smudge marks running on his cheeks from the tears, asking if I understood. “He said it was about time I stopped using hand-me-down’s…do you understand…do you?” When he breathed in, he made deep raspy noises and I wished more than anything in the world I could have done something for him. But there was nothing I could do except listen to him repeat what Mel had said. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as helpless as I did then.

  Just as he was beginning to get himself under control, the door opened and his mother came in. Corky’s father was with her, holding her steady by the elbow, and I could see the neighbors behind them in the living room, looking in at us.

  “I’m feeling better now, Corky,” his mother said. “I didn’t like for you to see me the way I was before—”

  “That’s okay,” Corky said, and he turned his back to her and leaned on the windowsill. He put his spikes on the dresser.

  “I heard you from the living room,” she said, and took a few steps toward him. “I know what you must be feeling now—you—you lost your best friend, didn’t you?” She had to fight to keep her tears back, I could see. Then she took another step toward Corky and reached out with her hands, to rest them on his shoulders, but the minute her fingertips touched him he whirled on her, screaming like a maniac. “Leave me alone! Leave me alone—/” She moved backwards as if somebody had punched her, and Corky’s father got to her quickly and held her up. Corky couldn’t stop screaming. “Goddamnit, just leave me alone! Leave me alone already!”

  “Look at him—” Corky’s father said then. Corky’s face was beet-red and the bottom of his mouth was spread wide, quivering. “You ain’t no good, Corky. I always said it, and I say it again.”

  “Stop, Frank—” Corky’s mother said. “He’s upset. Poor baby.” Then she was crying again, her chest heaving in and out. “He’s lost his best friend—he’s—”

  “This is my room—so get out! Out!” Corky screamed. “Just get out and leave me alone—!”

  “Sure,” his father said. “We’ll leave you alone—should of done it a few years back, all the good’s gonna come of you.” He stopped and hitched up his suspenders. “Maybe I never would of said this, not for what’s happened—but you’re a bum, Corky. Don’t know where it come from. Maybe it’s my seed—but you’re gonna wind up a bum, living all over the country, never settling down. Maybe it’s my fault. Like I say, I don’t know—”

  “Frank, please, I beg of you, stop—” his mother said. She clung to his arm, but Corky’s father wouldn’t stop now. I just stood there, wishing I could vanish. Corky’s father had always seemed a little strange to me and the other guys—to our parents too—but we knew from Corky that before they’d come to Brooklyn his father had run the family farm in Pennsylvania, and I guess we figured that all farmers dressed and talked the way he did. He was the most tight-mouthed man I ever met. In fact, in all the years Corky and I had been friends—he had come into our class in the second grade—this was the first time I think I’d ever heard his father speak more than one sentence at a time.

  “You let me speak my piece, and then I’ll be done for good, Margaret,” he said. “At least your brother, God bless his poor soul, at least he had an excuse with that baseball stuff of his—but you ain’t even gonna have that—you ain’t—”

  Corky leapt at his father as if he were going to kill him and then—it happened so fast I didn’t even have a chance to move—Mr. Williams had laid him out with one stroke of his hand. I’d never seen anyone react so quickly. One minute Corky’s hands were making for his throat, and the next minute Corky’s father had whipped his arm across and hit Corky square on the side of the face with the back of his hand and Corky was on the floor, stunned. His mother bent down, but Corky screamed at her to get away. “I’ll kill you some day,” he said to his father. “I swear to God I will—”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it,” his father said.

  “Frank, why? Why must you?” his mother was saying. “Why now—?”

  “The boy says he wants to be left alone, so we’ll leave him—” Corky’s father pushed his mother out the door and then turned back. Corky was still on the floor, feeling his jaw as if something were broken in it. “One other thing—all my kin’s coming up from Pennsylvania for the funeral and I ask you not to shame your mother or your brother’s memory the way I know you’d like to. They’ll be here by morning. You get this room cleaned up before that, you hear?”

  “Like hell I will,” Corky said as his father left the room. He got up from the floor and rubbed his jaw.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Sure. He caught me off guard, that’s all.”

  Corky picked up the pair of spikes from his dresser and put them back in the closet with the other stuff from Mel. “If I don’t put these away, my old man’II probably throw them out,” he explained to me.

  “What about your peep shows?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Corky. “You wanna give me a hand—I’ll stand on the chair and you hand ’em to me—”

  “You got any new ones?”

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m still working on the Ebbets Field one.” He got down on his hands and knees and pulled a big carton out from under his bed. “I’m gonna attach some flashlight batteries here, and some bulbs—” The short end of the carton, like the ends of all the shoeboxes around Corky’s room, had a little square cut out of it which was covered with cellophane, and inside, when Corky let light into the top of the box through special slats, you could see a baseball field laid out, with the stands painted on the sides of the carton. “I used green felt from an old pool table—the guy at Ryan’s on Church Avenue saved it for me—” I told Corky how great I thought it looked, and he said it would look better when he got the lights fixed on it. At school Corky was famous for his peep shows. They were always putting them on exhibit, and the teachers would say that if he applied the same imagination and skill to his work as he did to his hobby, he “could be somebody.” What amazed them, I guess, was the same thing that got us all: how a guy as restless and nervous as Corky was most of the time, could have so much patience when it came to making things on such a small scale for the peep shows. The top of his closet was stacked with them, a
nd I helped him put away the ones that were around the room—winter scenes made with cotton, scenes from foreign countries with trees made from twigs, and scenes with animals that Corky had copied from the exhibits at the Museum of Natural History. I looked into each one before I handed it to him, and it seemed to make him feel better to spend some time talking about them.

  “Mel really liked ’em,” he said when we were finished. “It was the first thing I ever did, I guess, that he hadn’t done—he used to brag to all of his friends about what a great artist I was.” He looked up at me. “Boy,” he said, shaking his head. “How long you think this is gonna go on, me remembering everything Mel ever said or did?” I shrugged and he patted me on the shoulder again. “You don’t gotta say anything, Howie. Come on, let’s get out of here before I start getting upset again.”

  “You ought to get some sleep,” his mother said when Corky announced that we were going for a walk. “You’ll need it.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Corky said.

  “Pa’s relatives will be here before morning,” she said.

  “So?”

  “I’m just telling you,” she said. Corky’s father didn’t add anything, or even look at Corky. He just sat back in his rocking chair as if he were in another world. He looked very old to me.

  “You okay?” Corky asked, kneeling next to Rhoda’s chair. She nodded and ran her hand over Corky’s blond hair. Then he whispered so the others wouldn’t hear: “If you need me to stay here, you just say the word, Rhoda—”

  “You go with Howie,” she said. “It’ll do you good to get some fresh air.” Then she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek softly. Her eyes were bloodshot from crying, I remember, but she looked more beautiful sitting in that dark room with her hair messed than I’d ever seen her. When I tried to imagine what she must have been thinking and feeling, I had to swallow hard to keep the tears back. Still, I knew I wanted to say something to her, and I guess I did because in the next instant I was standing next to her chair and she had touched me on the cheek and kissed me too. “Thanks, Howie,” she said. “You keep an eye on Corky now—”

  “You wanna come with me to see Mel?” Corky asked when we were outside.

  “Mel?”

  “Come on—” he said. “You don’t got to look at me like that—I didn’t bust my wig. I mean at the funeral parlor. I wanna see him by myself once—before the others.”

  “You know which place he’s at?”

  Corky nodded and turned up Rogers Avenue. I stayed next to him. At the corner of Rogers and Church, in the London Hut, the bus drivers were sitting, drinking coffee. “Sure I know where he is,” Corky said. “My old man ain’t been talking about anything but the funeral since last spring. He said he had to get my old lady ready for it. Bastard—” We walked up Church Avenue, toward Flatbush, past Holy Cross Church. “The way he kept talking, you could tell he was glad Mel was gonna die.”

  “Come on, Corky,” I said. “Your dad may be a louse, but I’m sure he didn’t want Mel to die—”

  “No?” Corky sneered. “You don’t know my old man. He’s got something twisted in him—ever since he had to leave the farm. Something happened then.”

  “What?”

  Corky shrugged. “I don’t remember. I was too young. But something happened with him and my uncle—that was Sarah Jean’s father—they ran the place together. There was fighting going on all the time, about money. That Sarah Jean’s mother—she’s a real bitch. My old man almost killed her once, went after her with an ax—I swear to God! I remember that. Me and Sarah Jean, we were playing in the barn when he took after her—we hid back of the bin of horseshoes. Sarah Jean’s old man hadn’t come, he would of chopped her head off. You should of seen him swinging that ax over his head—the horses, they were stamping like mad—I still remember that. I expected one of them to rear up and kill ’em both.”

  “Why’d he do it?” I asked.

  Corky shrugged, “I don’t know—she was a bitch, that’s all. I told you. She was always bugging him.” He laughed real loud. He seemed happy again. “He could of chopped her head off in one swipe too! You seen the power he has before, when he slugged me. On the farm he could beat any of the hands at tests of strength—he was always arm-wrestling somebody. The only guy who ever stood up to him was Mel.” Corky shook his head emphatically. “Mel never took any shit from that bastard.”

  We were almost at the funeral parlor, and Corky pointed it out to me. He hitched up his pants, set his jaw, and a minute later we’d walked through the door. The man there looked at us strangely. “What do you boys want?” he asked. The room was lit with a pale amber light. In the next room I could see a coffin, the top open. There were flowers all around it, and the inside was lined with fancy silk.

  ‘Is my brother ready?” Corky asked.

  The guy looked at Corky. “Your brother?”

  “Mel—Mel Williams.”

  “Melvin Williams,” the man repeated. His hair looked as if it had been drenched in oil. “Yes,” he said to himself. “Now I have it. The young man who…”

  “Cut the jazz,” Corky said. “I wanna see my brother. Is he ready?”

  The guy started apologizing to Corky in a Holy Joe tone about not having greeted us in a nicer way. “But we do have some young toughs who sometimes come in here at night and—”

  “Come on, come on,” Corky said. He was rubbing his palms furiously with his fingertips and for a second I could see him losing his temper and slugging the funeral guy.

  “Let me check,” the man said. He left us and Corky cursed. “Greasy bastard. He better not touch my brother—” The man returned after a minute and said that the “final preparations” would not be completed until the morning. “You sure?” Corky said.

  “Yes,” the man said. He started to offer his condolences, but Corky didn’t want them. The way his eyes were darting, and the way he kept shifting his feet and playing with his hands I think I must have been scared that Corky was not only going to slug him but was going to drag me down to the basement with him to look for Mel. I had this mad picture in my head of us pulling corpses out of these huge refrigerators, and the thought of the naked bodies, all fleshy and pink, made my stomach turn. I tasted some of the stuff from the party in my mouth, but I forced it back down.

  “What time?” Corky asked.

  “The family viewing is scheduled for ten o’clock,” the man said.

  “Will he be ready before that?”

  The man thought for a second. “Well, I imagine the preparations will be completed by our staff sometime before that, but, as I said—”

  “I’ll be here at nine,” Corky said. “You better be open. Come on, Howie.”

  We walked around a lot after that, and at about two or three in the morning we wound up at my house. My father was a restless sleeper and he got up when he heard us come in. I think he was going to give me hell for coming in so late, but when he saw Corky he changed his mind. He told him how sorry he was to hear about Mel, and Corky mumbled back a reply.

  “Can he stay here for the night?” I asked.

  My father hesitated. “Do your folks know?” he asked.

  Corky started to say something but I interrupted him and I surprised myself at how I could raise my voice to my father. “Jesus,” I said. “You’re not gonna be like that, are you? What’s the difference? If you don’t want him to stay here, just say so. Yes or no—”

  My father looked at Corky, then at me, then back at Corky. “Don’t wake your brother and sister,” he said. “You want me to get you up in the morning?”

  “I got to be at the funeral parlor at nine,” Corky said.

  My father promised he would wake us at eight and then he said good night and told us not to stay up too late talking. I was proud of him. “He doesn’t even need an alarm clock,” I explained to Corky later. “It’s like he’s got one built into his head—he can wake up any time he wants—on the dot.”

  I loaned Corky a pair of my pajama
s and we got undressed. When I’d opened my hi-riser, Corky lay on his back in the bed next to me, smoking. He cursed a few times and he seemed to be thinking about a lot of things. He thanked me for sticking with him and letting him sleep over, but I told him to shut up. Then he turned on his side and smiled at me.

  “Bet I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Bet you’re wondering if your girlfriend’s coming up from Pennsylvania. I’ll bet you can’t wait.”

  “Ah, come on, Corky—I never even met the girl. I mean—”

  He laughed and punched me in the arm. “Wait till you closed I could feel his eyeballs staring through the lids, each one pointing in a different direction. Corky walked fast when we left and I had to skip once in a while to keep up with him. “Bastards,” he kept muttering. “Goddamn bastards.” He seemed so mean and angry I was scared that when he got home he would really kill somebody. I’d never seen him as angry as he was then, and when he kept repeating the word “bastards” I couldn’t tell who he was referring to.

  As soon as he walked through the door of his home, though, and saw all his relatives sitting around the table eating breakfast, the anger left. He got the way he did at parties—self-conscious and unsure of himself. He went around the room shaking hands with everybody and being kissed by all the women, and he hardly said anything. He just kept jerking his head forward the way a very shy guy does when he’s introduced to somebody, and mumbling hello’s. He shoved his hands in and out of his pockets and he didn’t seem to be able to look anybody in the eye. He made the rounds of the room, staring at the floor most of the time, and then came back and stood by me.

  When Corky’s mother introduced me, saying I was Corky’s best friend and that I’d stayed with him since the news had come, I felt uncomfortable, like an intruder. Everybody said hello, but when they stared at me I felt they were looking at me as if I was the one who’d been responsible for Mel’s death. There must have been twenty to thirty of them in that small living room—about half of them sitting at the table drinking coffee, and the rest sitting in chairs, as quiet as Corky’s father. Some of the women dabbed at their eyes with handkerchiefs once in a while, and Rhoda and a few of the neighbors walked around in the silence asking if people had enough coffee.