A few hours later he comes home covered in gray ash, a thick outline around his eyes from his goggles, his hands black from the grime, a noticeable slump in his shoulders. He describes to us a day of standing on a rooftop breathing in dust and scraping brick. “It couldn’t have been that bad,” Mom says. “Didn’t it feel good to be out in the crisp air?”
“I was cold. Here.” He hands her a check with a black thumbprint on it. “I’m going to wash up.” He gets more jobs sweeping chimneys and each time he comes home covered in muck and ash. After a few weeks, he stops wearing the top hat when he goes out. “It makes me look stupid,” he says. He stops watching cartoons with us, just washes up and takes a shower and says, “Well, that wasn’t very fun.”
When he leaves on a drinking binge again, when Mom comes home from work and there are three messages from the answering service from a woman on Thompson Avenue asking what happened to the man from Stone Soup Chimney Sweeps, when Mom’s face goes white and she looks at us while cradling the receiver in her hand and asks, “Did Paul say where he was going,” Tony says, “He didn’t say anything, just packed up the truck and left.” She puts the receiver down. We have cereal for dinner that night because she’s too upset to cook. Tony declares that he’s tired of rabbit and he doesn’t care if we all die if that means we don’t have to eat the disgusting little creatures anymore. Mom is too anxious to fight, which means that she’s right on the edge of getting the depression.
The next morning I’m up at five again taking the frozen water bowls out of the barn, defrosting them with hot water in a pitcher from the kitchen sink, filling their food bowls with pellets from the fifty-pound feed bag at the back of the barn.
Paul parks his truck in front of the house a few nights later. We see him sitting there in the driver’s seat, hunched over the steering wheel. Mom goes outside to talk to him while we wait in the living room. “He was drunk. I told him to go away until he is sober,” she says when she comes back in. We tell her we don’t care that he’s drunk and it’s better that he’s home but she says kids shouldn’t see adults “when they’re using” because it might be bad for them. Tony says Dad drinks all the time and it’s fine and Mom says, “Paul is an alcoholic so it’s different. Your dad might be one too but he’s a functional alcoholic.” Tony says it doesn’t matter if he can function or not, it’s his house too so we should just let him sleep here since it’s below freezing and all he has is his truck. Mom says the truck smells like puke because of the “Duck Pill” Paul takes to make him sick when he drinks as part of his recovery and she doesn’t want us seeing him like that. We say we don’t care. We just don’t want him to freeze to death. She says that sometimes you have to practice “tough love” with people so they can reach “rock bottom” and go to AA. But Paul’s already in AA, we say. And what if he dies? Mom says she’s powerless over the disease and powerless over his actions. We say yeah but you could let him in the house so he has somewhere warm to sleep.
Every morning I take care of the rabbits and every night Mom checks the answering service to see if Paul took any of the chimney sweeping jobs. Every now and then he takes one. He probably does it drunk which Mom says is dangerous since he’s up on rooftops but “at least he’s working” because otherwise the business will go under and they’ll lose all the money they spent on the equipment. Without Paul’s money from chimney sweeping, we’re back to “stretching our food dollar,” which means scraping the dried-out peanut butter from the bottom of the gallon tub and nothing but bologna and bread with mustard and milk in our lunch pails and defrosted rabbit for dinner every night.
When I get home from school, I see Paul chopping wood with the big orange maul on the block next to the dog pen. He’s wearing loose jeans and a dark blue velvet-collared shirt, his scraggly beard longer than usual. There is something off about the way he swings the maul, an unsteadiness that makes him stumble while he laughs to himself. He sees me and asks how school was. I stand a few feet back. He takes stock of his appearance, looking down at the maul swaying in his hands, the mess of his clothes, realizing the trouble he’ll be in when he sobers up, laughing to himself in the way of all great drunks.
He is soft and fuzzy and odd and all I can think about is how he must’ve slept in the cold last night.
To be a drunk is to be a hero in a sad story.
“Can I have a hug?” he blurts out. I give him one, smelling the beer on his clothes, his body sweat and puke. “Thanks. I needed that. Are you guys okay?”
“Yeah, we’re fine. Mom is sad.”
“I know,” he rubs the back of his head. “It’s getting cold, so I thought I’d chop some wood for you.”
“Thanks,” I say, getting my bike from the back porch.
He pauses. “You know I love you right? I know you’re not my kid but I love you.”
“I know that,” I say because it’s true. “I love you too. I don’t care if you’re drunk.”
He wipes his glasses with the front of his shirt, turns back toward the woodpile, places a knotty stump on it, lifts the maul above his head and brings it down with a thump. The wood goes flying, splintering in all directions. I get on my bike and take off for the afternoon.
He’s gone when I get home and in his place Mom is inspecting the woodpile. “Did you do this?”
“No, Paul was here.”
“I thought maybe he was. Was he drunk?”
“I think so. But he was nice. He can’t help it, you know. He’s sick.”
“I know.”
That night Paul is outside the house again, parked in his truck. The light from the streetlight falls on him and we can see him drinking from a brown paper bag. Mom goes outside and tells him he has to leave. We watch her stand next to the truck with her arms crossed in front of her. Paul gets out and hugs her and they stand there like that for a long time. His arms around her, her arms crossed. He says something then gets back in his truck. Exhaust smoke and steam fill the cold air as he starts the engine and drives away. Mom stands alone for a moment, staring at the ground, then comes back inside.
“It’s bedtime,” she says.
“It’s only seven thirty.”
“I mean for me.” She goes into her room and closes the door behind her. I go to bed at nine thirty, but Tony stays up late watching The A-Team. I hear her get up and think she’s about to yell at him for missing his bedtime but instead the footsteps go into the bathroom where the sink turns on. A few minutes later the footsteps retreat back to the bedroom. When I wake up, Tony is still in the living room, asleep on the couch with the TV on. The house is cold because there is no fire. The sun isn’t up yet. I go outside with a flashlight to tend to the rabbits and when I come in, I turn on the stove and fry some eggs to eat with toast. I make a sandwich out of bologna, yellow mustard and wheat bread and put milk in my thermos. I knock on the door to see if Mom is okay. I can hear her crying in her room. “I’m fine, sweetie,” she says through the door. “Just go to school.”
It’s silent outside from the frost and snow as I walk the three blocks to school. Everywhere are frozen windshields and slush-filled curbs, leafless trees shuddering in the wind. The quiet is broken by the crunch of my sneakers on the sidewalk and the swish of my arms against my brown ski jacket, the one with the corduroy shoulders and the tear in the side where the stuffing had fallen out which I’d patched up one morning with Elmer’s glue and two pieces of black electrical tape.
* * *
WHEN PAUL SOBERS up, he asks Mom to marry him. There’s no ring because he can’t afford one even though Mom always says she wishes a good man would just “buy her a ring like my dad did for my mom,” but there is a big wedding with a sugar-free lemon cheesecake. Mom buys us brand-new Lee jeans which we wear with matching white-collared shirts and brown-and-gray–striped clip-on ties. She has white ribbons and orange flowers in her hair as she walks down the aisle. Les McCarthy is there and so are Frank and Barb and Diane, all the people from the AA campouts. When he came back,
Paul said, “I know I need to do better for this family and I will.” And this time Mom hardly scolded him, probably because he asked her to marry him, which made up for his leaving.
After the wedding, when we are a family with a capital F for “father,” legal and everything, Mom tells us that she loves Paul but if he leaves again, she’s going to divorce him. We are still in our clip-on ties, eating leftover sugar-free lemon wedding cheesecake. She says he’s a good man but he needs to be a better father to us. I know that Tony likes him too. We don’t ever think of him as a father. He’s more like another brother or maybe just someone who makes Mom easier to handle. When he’s home, we have more money and fewer chores and she isn’t locked in her room crying or lying on the floor next to the woodstove with that look that goes on forever.
At the wedding, Les McCarthy said to me, “Isn’t it great your mom’s getting married? She deserves happiness, don’t you think?” I nodded and wondered why everyone always wanted us to be worried about her. I didn’t tell him I was just glad that Paul was home so I didn’t have to get up at five to deal with the rabbits and Tony wasn’t as mean because Paul was bigger than he was and even though he never hit Tony, just being there made it less likely that Mom would fall into the depression or Tony would push me down the stairs when no one was looking.
CHAPTER 17
BROTHERS
Riding my bike on a crisp winter morning—the first sunny day in months after the endless rain ceased, the puddles steaming, the sun appearing like an embarrassed cousin from behind the gray-white clouds—weaving in and out of the cracks in the pavement under the canopy of trees on Eighteenth Street, inside left, outside right, bad luck to hit a crack, I suddenly hear a scream echo out through the neighborhood. There’s something desperate about it, something sad, like a dog caught in the axle of a truck. I stop and park my like-new-again yellow-and-blue Huffy Pro Thunder against the curb to listen. Another scream. There’s something familiar about it but I can’t place it. I pedal toward the school to investigate out of instinct, the way a cat will lurch at a bird trapped behind glass.
I park my bike at the edge of the field at the school to see, there, in the middle of the baseball diamond, my brother lying sideways on the ground with his arms twisted in front of his chest and his long blond hair falling over a red tear-soaked face. His yellow-and-white uniform is covered in dirt, untucked in bunches around his stomach. Standing over him with one foot on his back is a tall, thin red-haired boy in a wool-collared brown leather jacket, smiling like a demon at the group of boys who’ve gathered to watch.
What is it about freckles that makes a boy so mean?
“Say another word!” he yells as he stands on my brother’s back. “Anything. Just one word!”
“Stop it!” Tony cries.
The boy kicks him hard in the back. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you understand English, motherfucker?”
Tony spots me and our eyes lock.
I walk up to the crowd of boys. I don’t know any of them. “What’s happening?”
“We were playing baseball and this kid started mouthing off to Brian saying he sucks at pitching. So then Brian got pissed and decided to kick his ass but the kid won’t fight back. He’s just lying there on the ground.” I learn that Brian is Brian Medford and he is fourteen years old.
“Mick!” Tony screams. “Go get Paul! Hurry!”
“That’s your brother? Hey, kid, c’mere.” Brian Medford smiles at me like he’s inviting me to a carnival game. “You got something to say? ’Cause if you do, I’m gonna make your brother pay.”
“What do you mean?”
Brian Medford kicks Tony in the stomach. Tony makes a retching noise.
“I mean every time you talk, I’m going to hurt your brother.”
“Every time?” He kicks him again.
Tony lets out an awful groan, part cry, part grunt, that sounds like “Ahh-ohh-urgh.”
“Oh, so every time I speak you’re gonna hurt him?” Brian Medford stomps a black Converse high-top right into Tony’s ass.
“Yep.”
A strange feeling comes over me as I realize the potential of the situation. Or maybe it’s more like a feeling is lifted, the feeling of being under his thumb, or his weight, his spit, inside a headlock, watching him ruin another night where we could be sitting in the living room like a F-A-M-I-L-Y listening to Tchaikovsky. I smell the dirt of the field and feel the air on my neck and my arms begin to tingle.
“Anyway, as I was saying.” Brian Medford kicks Tony in the side. It sounds like a mallet hitting a sack of meat. I circle over him. “Star Wars is a great movie. Some might say underrated, despite its great success.” Brian Medford stomps on Tony’s chest as he cries. I see his red face in the dirt, his eyes filled with tears, his mouth twisted in anguish and I feel a hatred for this too. For his weakness. For his inability to get up and fight back.
“Fuck you, you piece of shit!” Brian kicks him in the back of the head. “Yeah, mothafucker, what about now? You’re not so fucking tough now are you?” Brian leans down and slaps him in the face in mockery, enjoying himself. “Who’s the fucking pussy now?”
“Leave me alone! Stop!” Tony screams through tears, his face covered in dirt, his nose bloody, his hair twisted into patches of brown mud and green grass.
Brian Medford stands over him, a red-haired, freckled goblin smiling and cracking his knuckles. “Your little brother is one cold dude.”
There is a tear in space and time, the laws of nature shifting. I’ve fallen through a hole into a place where I am the one with the power to hurt. I memorize his face all messed up in the dirt. I want to become something bigger than the land itself. So this is what it’s like to be the one with the power? It’s shocking to realize it’s in me to be like him. I wonder if it’s in him to be like me. If we didn’t choose ourselves at all but just became what was required of us, like characters following a script.
He sobs under Brian Medford’s shoe. He looks so sad. I try to focus on the anger, the revenge for my bike, but it’s hard to look away from his face, not to wonder if this is what was behind the anger. Maybe he would like to be in my place. Maybe in a different life somewhere we would switch. Maybe I would be the bad son and he would be the good son. I can feel the cruelty of it, like the crack of the baton on the baby bunny’s head, the clubs falling on Phil while he screams in the driveway. It makes me sick and sad. It mutes the colors of the world, turning yellow to gray and green to brown, extinguishing light and creating a dark place inside me.
I wish I could take my brother with me to somewhere new, where we could sit like other brothers do, those kids eating lunches of salami and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, and Frito-Lay potato chips, the feeling that you are protected, that there is enough for everyone, that a boy can close his eyes and sleep knowing someone is going to keep watch instead of the feeling we were both born with, that we know we are alone. Tony has it worse than I do, but I know how he feels because I feel it too. To have to study the faces of the adults, all the adults, who are always different, whose faces change constantly for mysterious reasons beyond our control or imagining, signifying danger or panic, fear or flight. Which is it going to be tonight?
“Okay, that’s enough,” I say. “Let’s leave him alone.”
“No,” Brian Medford shakes his head. “It’s not.”
“He’s not even moving. Just go home and we’ll go home.”
“No.” He nudges Tony’s whimpering head on the ground with his toe.
“I’m serious. Leave my brother alone!”
He kicks him again in the back and I feel something snap. “Leave him the fuck alone! That’s my brother! Stop it!” The crowd of boys watching begin to whoop as I lower my head toward Brian Medford. Tony is a baby bunny. Tony is my puppy, Mork. Tony is Mom helpless on the floor of the den. Tony is Paul drunk and lonely, puking in the front of the truck. My big brother who likes pizza and macaroni and cheese, who dances around the apartment in L.A
. with me in our matching tighty-whities.
I jump, running at Brian Medford with flailing arms. “Leave him alone! That’s my brother! That’s my brother!” He pushes me down and I get back up. My arms barely reach his chest. It’s like trying to punch a giraffe. He pushes me hard and I fall down into the dirt next to Tony.
“You guys are crazy.” He spits. He picks up a baseball glove from the ground and walks across the field to leave.
When he’s a safe distance away, Tony gets up. He goes to the fence, crying, bloody. He grabs his bike and yells over his shoulder, “Someday somebody bigger than you is gonna kick your ass! You’ll see!”
I follow him on my bike, trying to keep up. Sad for him and angry at myself. I know we are enemies, allies, traitors. Brothers.
Head down. Pedaling as hard as I can toward home, the spit still wet on my cheek, the brown dirt on his shoes flying off the pedals as we ride straight through the unlucky cracks on Eighteenth Street, I yell, “Someday you’ll get yours! You’ll see! You can’t hurt him! That’s my brother!”
CHAPTER 18
BULLETS
There is a gas can on the back porch meant for the lawn mower but since Paul doesn’t check it, I use it to pour lines of gasoline from one side of the alley to the other, striking a match and standing back to watch the flame leap across the gravel and mud, dancing as it goes. I pretend I’m trying to learn about fire but mostly I just like to watch things burn. I burn small piles of dried grass, notebook paper, receipt paper, brown paper grocery bags, a Luke Skywalker action figure, part of an X-wing fighter, rabbit shit, dog shit, dog hair, cat hair, rubber bands, packs of matches, old T-shirts, old socks, fishing line and once, by accident, the yellow linoleum floor in the kitchen beneath the ledge of the oven door. In the course of my studies, I discover that rubber burns black with smoke that stinks up your clothes, that you can light a peanut on fire and hold it in your hand like a candle, that plastic melts like wax but hair curls up into a tiny ball like an electric snail as it sparks and sputters and stinks up the room, that a gas can, if emptied of all liquid gas and set with a match, will shoot a line of blue flame five feet into the air, big and hot enough to singe the eyebrows right off your face.
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