Brothers and Keepers

by John Edgar Wideman

  Ever since Robby had entered the ward, he’d wanted to reach over and hide his friend’s arm under the covers. For two weeks Gar had been wasting away in the bed. Bad enough knowing Gar was dying. Didn’t need that pitiful stick arm reminding him how close to nothing his main man had fallen. So fast. It could happen so fast. If Robby tried to raise that arm it would come off in his hand. As gentle as he could would not be gentle enough. The arm would disintegrate, like a long ash off the end of a cigarette.

  Time to leave. No sense in sitting any longer. Garth not talking, no way of telling whether he was listening either. And Robby has nothing more to say. Choked up the way he gets inside hospitals. Hospital smell and quiet, the bare halls and bare floors, the echoes, something about all that he can’t name, wouldn’t try to name, rises in him and chills him. Like his teeth are chattering the whole time he’s inside a hospital. Like his entire body is trembling uncontrollably, only nobody can see it or hear it but him. Shaking because he can’t breathe the stuffy air. Hot and cold at the same time. He’s been aching to leave since he entered the ward. Aching to get up and bust through the big glass front doors. Aching to pounce on that spidery arm flung back behind Gar’s head. The arm too wasted to belong to his friend. He wants to grab it and hurl it away.

  Robby pulls on tight white gloves the undertaker had dealt out to him and the rest of the pallbearers. His brown skin shows through the thin material, turns the white dingy. He’s remembering that last time in Garth’s ward. The hospital stink. Hot, chilly air. A bare arm protruding from the sleeve of the hospital gown, more dried-up toothpick than arm, a withered twig, with Garth’s fingers like a bunch of skinny brown bananas drooping from the knobby tip.

  Robby had studied the metal guts of the hospital bed, the black scuff marks swirling round the chair’s legs. When he’d finally risen to go, his chair scraping against the vinyl floor broke a long silence. The noise must have roused Garth’s attention. He’d spoken again.

  You’re good, man. Don’t ever forget, Rob. You’re the best.

  Garth’s first words since the little banter back and forth when Robby had entered the ward and dragged a chair to the side of Gar’s bed. A whisper scarcely audible now that Robby was standing. Garth had tried to grin. The best he could manage was a pained adjustment of the bones of his face, no more than a shadow scudding across the yellow skull, but Robby had seen the famous smile. He hesitated, stopped rushing toward the door long enough to smile back. Because that was Gar. That was the way Gar was. He always had a smile and a good word for his cut buddies. Garth’s grin was money in the bank. You could count on it like you could count on a good word from him. Something in his face would tell you you were alright, better than alright, that he believed in you, that you were, as he’d just whispered, “the best.” You could depend on Garth to say something to make you feel good, even though you knew he was lying. With that grin greasing the lie you had to believe it, even though you knew better. Garth was the gang’s dreamer. When he talked, you could see his dreams. That’s why Robby had believed it, seen the grin, the bright shadow lighting Garth’s face an instant. Out of nothing, out of pain, fear, the certainty of death gripping them both, Garth’s voice had manufactured the grin.

  Now they had to bury Garth. A few days after the visit to the hospital the phone rang and it was Garth’s mother with the news of her son’s death. Not really news. Robby had known it was just a matter of time. Of waiting for the moment when somebody else’s voice would pronounce the words he’d said to himself a hundred times. He’s gone. Gar’s dead. Long gone before the telephone rang. Gar was gone when they stuck him up in the hospital bed. By the time they’d figured out what ailed him and admitted him to the hospital, it was too late. The disease had turned him to a skeleton. Nothing left of Garth to treat. They hid his messy death under white sheets, perfumed it with disinfectant, pumped him full of drugs so he wouldn’t disturb his neighbors.

  The others had squeezed into their pallbearers’ gloves. Cheap white cotton gloves so you could use them once and throw them away like the rubber ones doctors wear when they stick their fingers up your ass. Michael, Cecil, and Sowell were pallbearers, too. With Robby and two men from Garth’s family they would carry the coffin from Gaines Funeral Parlor to the hearse. Garth had been the dreamer for the gang. Robby counted four black fingers in the white glove. Garth was the thumb. The hand would be clumsy, wouldn’t work right without him. Garth was different. But everybody else was different, too. Mike, the ice man, supercool. Cecil indifferent, ready to do most anything or nothing and couldn’t care less which it was. Sowell wasn’t really part of the gang; he didn’t hang with them, didn’t like to take the risks that were part of the “life.” Sowell kept a good job. The “life” for him was just a way to make quick money. He didn’t shoot up; he thought of himself as a businessman, an investor not a partner in their schemes. They knew Sowell mostly through Garth. Perhaps things would change now. The four survivors closer after they shared the burden of Gar’s coffin, after they hoisted it and slid it on steel rollers into the back of Gaines’s Cadillac hearse.

  Robby was grateful for the gloves. He’d never been able to touch anything dead. He’d taken a beating once from his father rather than touch the bloody mousetrap his mother had nudged to the back door with her toe and ordered him to empty. The brass handle of the coffin felt damp through the glove. He gripped tighter to stop the flow of blood or sweat, whatever it was leaking from him or seeping from the metal. Garth had melted down to nothing by the end so it couldn’t be him nearly yanking off Robby’s shoulder when the box shifted and its weight shot forward. Felt like the coffin full of bricks. Robby stared across at Mike but Mike was a soldier, eyes front, riveted to the yawning rear door of the hearse. Mike’s eyes wouldn’t admit it, but they’d almost lost the coffin. They were rookie pallbearers and maneuvering down the carpeted front steps of Gaines Funeral Parlor they’d almost let Garth fly out their hands. They needed somebody who knew what he was doing. An old, steady head to show them the way. They needed Garth. But Garth was long gone. Ashes inside the steel box.

  They began drinking later that afternoon in Garth’s people’s house. Women and food in one room, men hitting the whiskey hard in another. It was a typical project apartment. The kind everybody had stayed in or visited one time or another. Small, shabby, featureless. Not a place to live. No matter what you did to it, how clean you kept it or what kind of furniture you loaded it with, the walls and ceilings were not meant to be home for anybody. A place you passed through. Not yours, because the people who’d been there before you left their indelible marks everywhere and you couldn’t help adding your bruises and knots for the next tenants. You could rent a kitchen and bedroom and a bathroom and a living room, the project flats were laid out so you had a room for each of the things people did in houses. Problem was, every corner was cut. Living cramped is one thing and people can get cozy in the closest quarters. It’s another thing to live in a place designed to be just a little less than adequate. No slack, no space to personalize, to stamp the flat with what’s peculiar to your style. Like a man sitting on a toilet seat that’s too small and the toilet too close to the bathtub so his knees shove against the enamel edge. He can move his bowels that way and plenty of people in the world have a lot less but he’ll never enjoy sitting there, never feel the deep down comfort of belonging where he must squat.

  Anyway, the whiskey started flowing in that little project apartment. Robby listened, for Garth’s sake, as long as he could to old people reminiscing about funerals they’d attended, about all the friends and relatives they’d escorted to the edge of Jordan, old folks sipping good whiskey and moaning and groaning till it seemed a sin to be left behind on this side of the river after so many saints had crossed over. He listened to people express their grief, tell sad, familiar stories. As he got high he listened less closely to the words. Faces and gestures revealed more than enough. When he split with Mike and Cecil and their ladies, Sowell tagged a
long. By then the tacky, low-ceilinged rooms of the flat were packed. Loud talk, laughter, storytellers competing for audiences. Robby half expected the door he pushed shut behind himself to pop open again, waited for bottled-up noise to explode into the funky hallway.

  Nobody thinking about cemeteries now. Nobody else needs to be buried today, so it was time to get it on. Some people had been getting close to rowdy. Some people had been getting mad. Mad at one of the guests in the apartment, mad at doctors and hospitals and whites in general who had the whole world in their hands but didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with it. A short, dark man, bubble-eyed, immaculately dressed in a three-piece, wool, herringbone suit, had railed about the callousness, the ignorance of white witch doctors who, by misdiagnosing Garth’s illness, had sealed his doom. His harangue had drawn a crowd. He wasn’t just talking, he was testifying, and a hush had fallen over half the room as he dissected the dirty tricks of white folks. If somebody ran to the hospital and snatched a white-coated doctor and threw him into the circle surrounding the little fish-eyed man, the mourners would tear the pale-faced devil apart. Robby wished he could feed them one. Remembered Garth weak and helpless in the bed and the doctors and nurses flitting around in the halls, jiving the other patients, ignoring Gar like he wasn’t there. Garth was dead because he had believed them. Dead because he had nowhere else to turn when the pain in his gut and the headaches grew worse and worse. Not that he trusted the doctors or believed they gave a flying fuck about him. He’d just run out of choices and had to put himself in their hands. They told him jaundice was his problem, and while his liver rotted away and pain cooked him dizzy Garth assured anyone who asked that it was just a matter of giving the medicine time to work. To kill the pain he blew weed as long as he had strength to hold a joint between his lips. Take a whole bunch of smoke to cool me out these days. Puffing like a chimney till he lost it and fell back and Robby scrambling to grab the joint before Garth torched hisself.

  When you thought about it, Garth’s dying made no sense. And the more you thought the more you dug that nothing else did neither. The world’s a stone bitch. Nothing true if that’s not true. The man had you coming and going. He owned everything worth owning and all you’d ever get was what he didn’t want anymore, what he’d chewed and spit out and left in the gutter for niggers to fight over. Garth had pointed to the street and said, If we ever make it, it got to come from there, from the curb. We got to melt that rock till we get us some money. He grinned then, Ain’t no big thing. We’ll make it, brother man. We got what it takes. It’s our time.

  Something had crawled in Garth’s belly. The man said it wasn’t nothing. Sold him some aspirins and said he’d be alright in no time. The man killed Garth. Couldn’t kill him no deader with a .357 magnum slug, but ain’t no crime been committed. Just one those things. You know, everybody makes mistakes. And a dead nigger ain’t really such a big mistake when you think about it. Matter of fact you mize well forget the whole thing. Nigger wasn’t going nowhere, nohow. I mean he wasn’t no brain surgeon or astronaut, no movie star or big-time athlete. Probably a dope fiend or gangster. Wind up killing some innocent person or wasting another nigger. Shucks. That doctor ought to get a medal.

  Hey, man. Robby caught Mike’s eye. Then Cecil and Sowell turned to him. They knew he was speaking to everybody. Late now. Ten, eleven, because it had been dark outside for hours. Quiet now. Too quiet in his pad. And too much smoke and drink since the funeral. From a bare bulb in the kitchen ceiling light seeped down the hallway and hovered dimly in the doorway of the room where they sat. Robby wondered if the others felt as bad as he did. If the cemetery clothes itched their skin. If they could smell grave dust on their shoes. He hoped they’d finish this last jug of wine and let the day be over. He needed sleep, downtime to get the terrible weight of Garth’s death off his mind. He’d been grateful for the darkness. For the company of his cut buddies after the funeral. For the Sun Ra tape until it ended and plunged them into a deeper silence than any he’d ever known. Garth was gone. In a few days people would stop talking about him. He was in the ground. Stone-cold dead. Robby had held a chunk of crumbly ground in his white-gloved fingers and mashed it and dropped the dust into the hole. Now the ground had closed over Garth and what did it mean? Here one day and gone the next and that was that. They’d bury somebody else out of Gaines tomorrow. People would dress up and cry and get drunk and tell lies and next day it’d be somebody else’s turn to die. Which one of the shadows in this black room would go first? What did it matter? Who cared? Who would remember their names; they were ghosts already. Dead as Garth already. Only difference was, Garth didn’t have it to worry about no more. Garth didn’t have to pretend he was going anywhere cause he was there. He’d made it to the place they all were headed fast as their legs could carry them. Every step was a step closer to the stone-cold ground, the pitch-black hole where they’d dropped Garth’s body.

  Hey, youall. We got to drink to Garth one last time.

  They clinked glasses in the darkness. Robby searched for something to say. The right words wouldn’t come. He knew there was something proper and precise that needed to be said. Because the exact words eluded him, because only the right words would do, he swallowed his gulp of heavy, sweet wine in silence.

  He knew he’d let Garth down. If it had been one of the others dead, Michael or Cecil or Sowell or him, Garth wouldn’t let it slide by like this, wouldn’t let it end like so many other nights had ended, the fellows nodding off one by one, stupefied by smoke and drink, each one beginning to shop around in his mind, trying to figure whether or not he should turn in or if there was a lady somewhere who’d welcome him in her bed. No. Garth would have figured a way to make it special. They wouldn’t be hiding in the bushes. They’d be knights in shining armor around a big table. They’d raise their giant, silver cups to honor the fallen comrade. Like in the olden days. Clean, brave dudes with gold rings and gold chains. They’d draw their blades. Razor-edged swords that gleam in the light with jewels sparkling in the handles. They’d make a roof over the table when they stood and raised their swords and the points touched in the sky. A silver dagger on a satin pillow in the middle of the table. Everybody roll up their sleeves and prick a vein and go round, each one touching everybody else so the blood runs together and we’re brothers forever, brothers as long as blood flows in anybody’s arm. We’d ride off and do unbelievable shit. The dead one always with us cause we’d do it all for him. Swear we’d never let him down.

  It’s our time now. We can’t let Garth down. Let’s drink this last one for him and promise him we’ll do what he said we could. We’ll be the best. We’ll make it the top for him. We’ll do it for Garth.

  Glasses rattle together again. Robby empties his and thinks about smashing it against a wall. He’d seen it done that way in movies but it was late at night and these crazy niggers might not know when to stop throwing things. A battlefield of broken glass for him to creep through when he gets out of bed in the morning. He doesn’t toss the empty glass. Can’t see a solid place anyway where it would strike clean and shatter to a million points of light.

  My brother had said something about a guy named Garth during one of my visits to the prison. Just a name mentioned in passing. Garth or Gar. I’d asked Robby to spell it for me. Garth had been a friend of Robby’s, about Robby’s age, who died one summer of a mysterious disease. Later when Robby chose to begin the story of the robbery and killing by saying, “It all started with Gar dying,” I remembered that first casual mention and remembered a conversation with my mother. My man and I were in the kitchen of the house on Tokay Street. My recollection of details was vague at first but something about the conversation had made a lasting impression because, six years later, hearing Robby say the name Garth brought back my mother’s words.

  My mother worried about Robby all the time. Whenever I visited home, sooner or later I’d find myself alone with Mom and she’d pour out her fears about Robby’s wildness, the deep
trouble he was bound for, the web of entanglements and intrigues and bad company he was weaving around himself with a maddening disregard for the inevitable consequences.

  I don’t know. I just don’t know how to reach him. He won’t listen. He’s doing wrong and he knows it but nothing I say makes any difference. He’s not like the rest of youall. You’d misbehave but I could talk to you or smack you if I had to and you’d straighten up. With Robby it’s like talking to a wall.

  I’d listen and get angry at my brother because I registered not so much the danger he was bringing on himself, but the effect of his escapades on the woman who’d brought us both into the world. After all, Robby was no baby. If he wanted to mess up, nobody could stop him. Also Robby was my brother, meaning that his wildness was just a stage, a chaotic phase of his life that would only last till he got his head together and decided to start doing right. Doing as the rest of us did. He was my brother. He couldn’t fall too far. His brushes with the law (I’d had some, too), the time he’d spent in jail, were serious but temporary setbacks. I viewed his troubles, when I thought about them at all, as a form of protracted juvenile delinquency, and fully expected Robby would learn his lesson sooner or later and return to the fold, the prodigal son, chastened, perhaps a better person for the experience. In the meantime the most serious consequence of his wildness was Mom’s devastating unhappiness. She couldn’t sustain the detachment, the laissez-faire optimism I had talked myself into. Because I was two thousand miles away, in Wyoming, I didn’t have to deal with the day-to-day evidence of Robby’s trouble. The syringe Mom found under his bed. The twenty-dollar bill missing from her purse. The times he’d cruise in higher than a kite, his pupils reduced to pinpricks, with his crew and they’d raid the refrigerator and make a loud, sloppy feast, all of them feeling so good they couldn’t imagine anybody not up there on cloud nine with them enjoying the time of their lives. Cruising in, then disappearing just as abruptly, leaving their dishes and pans and mess behind. Robby covering Mom with kisses and smiles and drowning her in baby-talk hootchey-coo as he staggers through the front door. Her alone in the ravaged, silent kitchen, listening as doors slam and a car squeals off on the cobblestones of Tokay, wondering where they’re headed next, wishing, praying Robby will return and eat and eat and eat till he falls asleep at the table so she can carry him upstairs and tuck him in and kiss his forehead and shut the door gently on his sleep.