by Steve Toltz
He climbed the tree, sat on the branch opposite me, and started untying the knots.
“What’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone hates you!”
“All right. I’m not popular. So what?”
“So why does everyone hate you?”
“They have to hate someone. Who else are they going to hate, if not me?”
We sat in that tree all afternoon, for five hours, during two of which I had acute vertigo. The bell rang every now and then, and we watched children move from one class to another, obedient yet casual, like soldiers in peacetime. We watched them all day, neither of us talking. In the silence all our differences suddenly seemed unimportant. Terry’s balancing on the branch beside me was an enormously significant gesture of solidarity. His presence said to me: You are alone but not utterly alone. We are brothers, and nothing can change that.
The sun moved across the sky. Wispy clouds were transported on fast winds. I looked at my classmates as through a double-glazed bulletproof window and thought: There is no more chance of communication between us than between an ant and a stone.
Even after three, when the school day ended, Terry and I stayed put, silently watching as a cricket game started up below us. Bruno and Dave and five or six other children were arranged in a semicircle, running and jumping and diving in the dirt as if there were nothing fragile about the human body. They let out roars, in crescendo, and occasionally the twins would look up at the tree and call out my name in a singsong voice. I winced at the thought of all the beatings I still had ahead of me, and tears came to my eyes. They were tears of fear. How could I get out of this situation? I watched those two bullies below and wished I had dangerous, mysterious powers that they could feel in their guts. I imagined them singing their taunts with mouthfuls of blood.
Suddenly I had the idea.
“They’re cheating,” I said to Terry.
“They are?”
“Yeah. I hate cheats, don’t you?”
Terry’s breathing became slow and irregular. It was a remarkable thing to witness; his face spluttered like hot grease in a pan.
It’s not melodramatic to say the entire fate of the Dean family was decided that afternoon in the tree. I’m not proud of myself for inciting my little brother to attack my attackers, and of course if I had had any way of knowing that by manipulating his fanatical reverence for sport, I was effectively ordering dozens of body bags direct from the manufacturers, I probably wouldn’t have done it.
I can’t tell you much about what happened next. But I can tell you that Terry climbed down, grabbed the cricket bat from an astonished Bruno, and slammed it into the side of his head. I can tell you that the fight had been going for only about fifteen seconds when Dave, the uglier of the nonidentical twins, pulled a butterfly knife and thrust it hard into Terry’s leg. I can tell you what the scream sounded like, because it was mine. Terry didn’t let out a sound. Even as blood pissed from the wound and I climbed down and ran into the mix and dragged him away, he was silent.
The next day, in hospital, an unsympathetic doctor casually told Terry that he’d never play football again.
“What about swimming?”
“Not likely.”
“Cricket?”
“Maybe.”
“Really?”
“I don’t know. Can you play cricket without running?”
“No.”
“Then no.”
I heard Terry swallow. We all heard it. It was pretty loud. A softness in his eight-year-old face became instantly hard. We witnessed the exact moment he was forcibly disengaged from his dreams. A moment later tears poured out of him and he made unpleasant guttural noises I’ve had the misfortune to hear once or twice since, inhuman noises that accompany the sudden arrival of despair.
Philosophy
Terry’s old wish had been granted: he was a cripple, just like his big brother. Only now that I’d returned to normal health, Terry was on his own. He used my discarded crutches to get from A to B, but sometimes he preferred to stay at A for days on end, and then when he no longer needed the crutches, he switched to a varnished cane of dark wood. He cleared his room of all the sporting paraphernalia: the posters, the photographs, the newspaper clippings, his football, cricket bat, and swimming goggles. Terry wanted to forget. But how could he? You can’t run from your own leg, especially a leg that carries the weight of broken dreams.
My mother tried to console her son (and herself ) by infantilizing him—making his favorite meal (sausages and baked beans) every day, trying to snuggle him, speaking to him in baby talk, and constantly touching his hair. If he had let her, she would have stroked his forehead until the skin came off. My father was depressed too—sulking, overeating, speed-drinking beer, and cradling Terry’s sporting trophies in his arms like dead babies. These were the days my father got fat. In a frenzy, he ate every meal as if it were his last. For the first few months it all pushed out the front and his naturally skinny frame shook with the sudden alteration, but finally it buckled so that his waist and hips fell into line too, expanding to a width exactly one quarter of an inch wider than the average doorway. Blaming me for the calamity cheered him up a little. It wasn’t one of those revelations that would need to be drawn out of him in psychotherapy, either. He didn’t bury his blame but expressed it outright, over dinner, waving his fork menacingly at me like an exorcist’s crucifix.
Fortunately, he was soon distracted by a return to his old obsession: the prison on the hill. He and the warden were drinking buddies and for years they played pool every night, for fun making $100,000 bets on each game. The warden was into my father for an astronomical amount of pretend money. One day my father surprised his friend by demanding he pay up, but instead of insisting his debt be met with money, my father made a strange and dark bargain: he’d forget the $27 million owed to him, and in exchange the warden must bring copies of the inmates’ files down from his office. With his son’s future blown, the only thing my father was proud of was having helped build that prison, a solid achievement he could see from our front porch. So of course he felt he had a right to know who the guests were. The warden photocopied the files, and night after night my father pored over the case histories of murderers and rapists and thieves and imagined them rattling the bars he himself had welded. If you ask me, this was the beginning of the end for my father, although there was an incredibly long fall yet to come. This was also when he began to rave at my mother in public so much that she could no longer bear being with him outside the house; and so she wasn’t, ever again, and on the rare occasion they bumped into each other in the street, an awkwardness fell over them and they were eerily polite. It was only back at home that their normal selves would reappear and they’d yak on insultingly ad nauseam.
Things were strange at school for a while too. As you know, I never fit in; I couldn’t even squeeze in. Terry, on the other hand, had been accepted and embraced from day one, but now, after he lost the use of his leg for athletic purposes, he squeezed himself out. I kept an eye on him as he hobbled around the school grounds, squashing the tip of his cane into classmates’ toes and putting all his weight on it. Personally, I think it wasn’t only his own disappointment that was turning him cold and nasty. It was also a reaction to the endless compassion he had to deal with. You see, people were all very sympathetic to him on account of his loss, plying him with huge dollops of aggravating kindness. It was the worst thing for him. Some people are body-and-soul repulsed at being a figure of pity. Others, such as me, can soak it up greedily, mostly because having pitied themselves for so long, it seems right that everyone else is finally getting on the bandwagon.
Bruno and Dave glared menacingly at Terry whenever they crossed paths. Terry stood his ground and gave them his slipperiest smile. That led into a stare-off, one of those battles of masculinity that looks very silly to a passerby. Later, as I trailed Terry through the school corridors, I realized he followed Bruno an
d Dave wherever they went. What did he want with them? Revenge? A rematch? I implored him to leave them alone. “Fuck off, Marty!” he spat back at me.
I went back up in the tree. Now I’d put myself there. It had become my secret hiding place. I’d learned a valuable lesson: people almost never look up. Who knows why? Maybe they’re looking at the soil for a preview of coming attractions. And so they should. I think anyone who says he looks to the future and doesn’t have one eye on the dirt is being shortsighted.
One day I saw a commotion below: the students were running haphazardly around the playground, in and out of the classrooms, calling out. I strained my ears in the weird way humans can strain their ears when they want to. They were shouting my name. I hugged the branch so hard I got a full-body splinter. Every student in school was after me for something. But what now? What now? Two students stopped under the tree for a breather and I caught the news: Bruno and Dave had requested my presence behind the school gym. It’s about time, I heard the students say. If stabbing my brother was a statement, maybe I was to be the exclamation point. The consensus was that they were going to tear me apart. Everyone wanted to do his bit.
Then one girl caught sight of me, and two minutes later a crowd was carrying me on their shoulders as if I were a hero, but they were really delivering meat to the butcher. They bounced like puppies as they ferried me to Bruno and Dave, who waited behind the gym. “Here he is!” the children cried, dropping me unceremoniously in the dirt. I slowly rose to my feet, just for the hell of it. You could have sold tickets—it was the hottest show in town.
“Martin,” Dave shouted, “if anyone…anyone…ever… touches you…or hits you…or pushes you…or even so much as looks at you funny, you come to me and I will ANNIHILATE them! You understand?”
I didn’t understand. Neither did the crowd.
“You are now under our protection, OK?”
I said OK.
The mob was silent. Dave spun around to face them. “Anyone have a problem with that?”
No one had a problem with that. They squirmed like they were all caught on a hook.
“Right.” Then Dave turned to me and said, “Smoke?”
I didn’t move. He had to put the cigarette in my mouth and light it.
“Now inhale.”
I inhaled and coughed violently. Dave patted me on the back in a friendly manner. “You’re all right, mate,” he said, with a toothy smile. Then he walked away. The crowd was too stunned to move. I struggled to keep my equilibrium. I’d thought I was in for a beating, not a saving. I was a protected species now. It puffed me up like a blowfish. I turned to the confused horde and offered them a challenge with my eyes. They all looked away, every last eye.
Eight-year-old Terry Dean had made a deal with the devils for his twelve-year-old brother, that’s what saved my skin. He’d seen me cowering behind garbage bins one day and suffering the monotonous grind of invisibility the next, so—loyal brother that he was—Terry proposed a deal: if they’d offer me protection, he’d join their demented crew. He suggested that he be their apprentice, a trainee thug. Who knows why they accepted? Maybe they liked his spirit. Maybe they were confused by the audacity of his request. Whatever the reason, when they asked him to write a little memo detailing the arrangement in his own blood, without hesitation Terry cut into himself with a Stanley knife and spelled it out so the pact was all there in red and white.
This was my brother’s premature entry into a life of crime. Over the next couple of years he spent all of his after-school time with Bruno and Dave, and since Terry was too young to keep their kind of hours alone, I had to tag along. At first the twins tried to coerce me to run errands for them, but at Terry’s insistence I was allowed to sit under a tree and read, even during the street fights. And there were always fights. The gang couldn’t sleep well if they hadn’t smashed someone’s face in at some point during the day. Once they’d fought every likely candidate in our town, Bruno would steal his father’s Land Rover and drive them to nearby towns for the face-smashing. There were plenty of kids to fight. Every town has tough guys, a new generation of prison filler waiting to happen.
Each afternoon they taught Terry how to fight. They had constructed a whole philosophical system based on violence and combat, and as Terry’s fists formed bony bricks, Bruno and Dave became a double act, one asking a question while the other answered it.
“What are your hands for?”
“Curling into fists.”
“What are your legs for?”
“Kicking.”
“And the feet?”
“Stomping in a face.”
“Fingers?”
“Gouging.”
“Teeth?”
“Biting.”
“Head?”
“Head-butting.”
“Elbow?”
“Jamming into jaws.”
Et cetera.
They preached the human body as not only a weapon but an entire arsenal, and as I watched them drum this oily gospel into Terry’s head, I thought about my own body in comparison—an arsenal aimed inward, at myself.
When they weren’t fighting, they were stealing—anything and everything. With no discerning eye for value, they swiped junked cars, broken car parts, school supplies, sporting goods; they broke into bakeries and stole bread, and if there wasn’t any bread they stole dough; they broke into hardware stores and stole hammers and ladders and lightbulbs and showerheads; they broke into butchers’ and stole sausages and meat hooks and lamb shanks; they robbed the post office of stamps and uncollected mail; they broke into the Chinese restaurant and took chopsticks and hoisin sauce and fortune cookies; and from the service station they stole ice and frantically tried to sell it before it melted.
If you were unlucky enough to be around after one of their stealing expeditions, you’d have to get ready to go shopping. Their sales technique was impressive. For Bruno and Dave, business was always booming, because they’d found a niche market: terrified children.
Terry got in the thick of it too, crawling through windows and air vents, getting into those hard-to-reach places while I waited outside and pleaded internally for them to hurry. I pleaded so hard I hurt myself. Over the months, while Terry was developing muscles, agility, and hand-to-hand combat skills, I was degenerating again. My parents, fearing a return of my old sickness, called a doctor. He was stumped. “It looks like nerves,” he said, “but what does a twelve-year-old have to be nervous about?” The doctor peered curiously at my scalp. “What happened to your hair?” he asked. “Looks like some of it’s fallen out.” I shrugged and looked around the room as if searching for the hair. “What’s this?” my father shouted. “He’s losing his hair? Oh my God, what a child!” A Pandora’s box of angst opened whenever I witnessed my brother in mid-robbery, but when there was a street fight, I put my whole soul into fretting. Every day when we walked home I pleaded with Terry to break away. I was absolutely convinced I was going to watch my brother die right before my eyes. Because of Terry’s age and size, Bruno and Dave armed him with a cricket bat, which he waved in the air as he let out a war cry and fast-limped it to their enemies. Rarely would an opponent stick around to see what he’d do with the bat, although some did stand their ground, and during one fight, Terry got slashed with a knife. Gasping, I ran into the middle of the fight and dragged him away. Bruno and Dave slapped him around to toughen him up, then sent him back in while the blood was still flowing. I screamed in protest until my voice ran out, then I shouted air.
These weren’t schoolyard fights, this was gang warfare. I’d look at the snarling faces of the young as they flung themselves into battle, having the time of their lives. Their indifference to violence and pain mystified me. I couldn’t comprehend these creatures, rabid with joy, squashing each other into the dust. And the way they adored their injuries—it was baffling. They gazed at their gaping wounds like lovers reunited after a long separation. It was nuts.
Caroline couldn’t understa
nd them either. She was livid at me for letting my little brother join these thugs, even though she was happy the gang was protecting me. Her furious words left an afterglow on my cheek: her attention was all I needed. I still admired myself for my friendship with Caroline. Our conversations were the best thing about me and the only thing I loved about my life, especially since every afternoon Bruno and Dave would flick lit cigarettes at me and threaten me with various ingenious tortures, my favorite being that they would bury me alive in a pet cemetery. They never followed up, though, because Terry had made it clear that if I suffered so much as one scratch, he would quit. Clearly the twins could spot talent. They figured he was a criminal prodigy; why else would these two thugs obey him? If you asked them, they might have said it was a mixture of his energy, his sense of humor, his willingness to follow every order, his utter fearlessness. Whatever it was, they felt good having him around, even if it meant putting up with his brooding older brother who’d do nothing but read. Those books of mine really got under their skin. Ironically, they thought I was inhuman because of the way I churned through library books.
“How do you know how to pick them? Who tells you?” Dave asked me once.
I explained that there was a line. “If you read Dostoyevsky, he mentions Pushkin, and so you go and read Pushkin and he mentions Dante, and so you go and read Dante and—”
“All right!”
“All books are in some way about other books.”
“I get it!”
It was an endless search, and endlessly fruitful; the dead sent me hurtling through time, through the centuries, and while Bruno seethed at my wide-eyed reverence for something as inert and unmanly as a book, Dave was intrigued. Sometimes he’d flop down beside me after a fight, and with blood streaming down his face he’d say, “Tell me what you’re reading about.” And I’d tell him, keeping an eye on Bruno, who burned with white-hot ignorant hate. More than once he tore my books into shreds. More than once I sat horrified as one of them flew off the edge of a cliff. There goes Crime and Punishment! There goes Plato’s Republic! The pages may have spread like wings as they fell, but they wouldn’t fly.