Brother

by David Chariandy

  —

  Francis had nightmares. He’d be lying in the bunk above me, and I’d listen to his breathing, the soft wheeze he might have from allergies or a cold. He’d be on the edge of sleep when some terror would visit him. He’d wake screaming a deep body scream, all cracked throat and emptied stomach, and it would take me a while to realize that I’d been screaming too. If Mother was home, she’d offer comfort. She’d lie beside us, and with the warmth of her body push back the fear. We’d lie quiet and awake, the three of us, for a long time, watching the wind blow ghosts into the drapes and cars passing by on the avenue cast moving lights upon the walls and ceiling.

  Never speaking. Listening for things.

  What scares two boys aged ten and eleven? Sometimes, in the midst of our play, a siren would cut the air and cars with flashing lights would brake screeching on the avenue, a neighbourhood kid soon cuffed on the sidewalk, his face turned away from us in shame. There were tales about boys jumped and beaten, faces ruined, jaws wired shut. “I saw it myself,” claimed one; “I did it,” claimed another, and we were never sure if either ought to be believed. Always, there were stories on TV and in the papers of gangs, killings in bad neighbourhoods, predators roaming close. One morning, I peered with Francis into a newspaper box to read a headline about the latest terror and caught in the glass the reflection of our own faces.

  —

  From the age of seven, Francis could read. He read books, of course, regularly and well into his teens. But he could also read the many signs and gestures around us. He could read the faces of the neighbourhood youth hanging around outside 7-Eleven and know when to offer a nod or else a sly joke or else just to keep moving and not just then attempt to meet a bruised pair of eyes. But especially, Francis could read our mother. He recognized her pride, but also the routes and tolls of her labours. He knew that for work as a cleaner, and sometimes a nanny, she had not only tough hours but also long journeys, complicated rides along bus routes to faraway office buildings and malls and homes, long waits at odd hours at stops and stations, sometimes in the rain or the thick heat of the afternoon, sometimes in the cold and dark of winter. He understood that there is a specific moment during the trip back home from work when a mother’s body threatens to give out. A specific site in the bus loop at Kennedy Station when exhaustion closes in and the limbs feel like meat, and it takes every last strength from a mother to make the two additional bus transfers home.

  When Francis was still not quite a teen, and Mother returned home in a state, he would go to work. He would casually offer her a cool, damp cloth for her head, maybe even a pan of water and Epsom salts for her feet. He would fetch a blanket in winter, or a fan and a glass of water in summer. He was careful never to overdo his concern, and so wound her pride, or otherwise to break any of the household rules she had established to help us through lean times. But one hot summer day, when Mother collapsed on the couch, shaking her head at all offered food, unwilling to take a sip of water or even to open her eyes, twelve-year-old Francis dared big.

  He went to the kitchen and took from the freezer a can of orange juice concentrate. We had been warned repeatedly by Mother never to touch such stuff without her permission. And if she allowed us to touch it, we were to use five cans of water to dilute the concentrate, never three as the fool instructions on the can said. But on that day, Francis used just one can of water, mashing it into the frozen lump of concentrate with a wooden spoon, and pouring the slush bright into a glass. He gently lowered the glass into Mother’s curled fingers, her eyes still closed. I braced for all hell to break loose as she tasted, her mouth moving as if eating pudding.

  “I made it sweet this time,” explained Francis.

  “Sweet,” Mom said, a tired smile.

  She touched his face. She cupped his chin and touched the growing shadow of his moustache. She pinched his earlobe lightly between her thumb and finger as if it were a raindrop from a leaf, then reached to gently pluck something from his hair. A burr from the Rouge Valley.

  —

  The Rouge Valley. It was a wound in the earth. A scar of green running through our neighbourhood, hundreds of feet deep in some places, a glacial valley that existed long before anything called Scarborough. It had been bridged near our home, turned into a park with a paved asphalt walkway running alongside the creek. When we were very young, and Mother could spare the time, she would take us there for picnics. But soon Francis and I preferred to visit it on our own, scorning the paved walkway down into its parklands, opting instead for the footpath that we ourselves had broken through the undergrowth and down the steep slope until we reached the floor of that deep green valley.

  When we were very young, we’d build forts and hideaways in the brush, using branches but also cardboard and broken pieces of furniture occasionally dumped here. We’d race twigs in the creek, spot the little speckled fish swimming together in the blowing current, hunt for the other small lives that had managed to survive in the park unnoticed. The tracks in the mud of a muskrat or a raccoon or maybe a turtle. One summer we used a stick to corner a crayfish, blue-red and mottled, and Francis explained shiveringly how it grew by cracking its own body open. One fall we piled the stuff of this land over our bodies like blankets. Coloured leaves and pine needles, branches and the barbed wire of thistles. Also plastic bags and foil drifting down from the fast-food joints above. Our hair camouflaged with mashed drinking straws and rushes. Our faces already the colour of earth.

  The Rouge was not “nature,” not that untouched land you could watch on wildlife shows or read about in history books. The Rouge wasn’t the sort of place you could pretend to have discovered, nor imagine empty and now your own. But it was the place we knew, and the place, even as we grew older, we kept returning to.

  —

  Late one evening during the fall Francis turned fourteen, we visited for the last time. It had been a long time, perhaps more than a year, since we’d gone to the Rouge together. We walked to the edge of the bridge and spent a bit of time rummaging along the guardrail, trying to find the head of our path amidst the brush and fallen leaves and blown trash from the road. Twice passing cars honked angrily at us. Finally, Francis said, “Over here,” and we began edging carefully down the steepest part of the valley’s slope, slipping wildly and only slowing down by grabbing brush and low branches. Eventually, the ground levelled and we broke out into a small clearing. Francis had a green canvas backpack with him, and when we were seated by the creek he surprised me by pulling out a six-pack of Molson Canadian. He broke one from its plastic ring and opened it with a soft whisper crack and passed it to me. I sipped carefully, trying not to make a face at the bitterness. We were quiet for some time as we drank our cans and the trees turned to black shadows against the night sky.

  When I was a child, Francis protected me. I was smaller than him, of course, but I was also somehow less of a proper presence. There was my nervous smile. There was my hair, which, unlike his, was fundamentally indecisive, forever caught in that no man’s zone between Afro and hockey mullet. As I approached adolescence, there was the growing concern over my cultural tastes. My air-drumming to Rush, for instance, or my painstaking illustration of the flowing-haired Gondolfin, my fourteenth-level multi-classed half-elf, now abruptly recognized as gay. Francis and I had lived together in the same room all of our lives, but there had recently been a series of disheartening intimacies. The occasion when Francis came home with new friends and they caught me before the television imitating the dancing in Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long.” The far more serious time he walked into our bedroom to see me masturbating with Mazola corn oil to the women’s underwear section of the Eaton’s catalogue.

  “Eaton’s?” he had asked me later, softly, never meeting my eyes. “Really?”

  So as we sat with our beer in the Rouge, I expected him to give me one of his lectures on conduct and attitude, on “getting it.” But instead, we just helped ourselves to a second can of Canadian. We listened t
o the night sounds of insects and the thinned waters of the creek and the muffled noises of vehicles passing high above us on the bridge. And when Francis did speak, it was about neighbourhood boys. He mentioned Scatter and Brownman, Tiger and Anton, and I knew them all. When I was alone, in the schoolyard or strip mall parking lot, they would push me around in showy ways, never really hurting me, just humiliating me, reminding me of my place in the world. But Francis had intervened, and the targeting stopped. Francis said these very same boys talked about the disses they had experienced. They talked about lurking enemies and of protecting themselves with weapons.

  “Assholes,” I said.

  Francis nodded, and I could tell it was not only a nod of agreement but also the gesture you make when a point has been missed and you just want to move on because it’s all somehow too old and too late to try now to explain.

  —

  I know now that by the age of fourteen, you feel it. You spot the threat that is not only about young men with weapons, about “gangs” and “predators,” but also the threat that is slow and somehow very old. A mother lecturing you about arrival and opportunity while her breath stinks of the tooth she can’t just for the moment afford the time or money to fix. And as Francis began to approach adulthood, he grew dissatisfied with the world and with his destined place in it.

  By the time Francis turned eighteen, he spent almost all his time away from me and with boys I didn’t know well at all. They were older and from different parts of Scarborough, not just the Park. They styled themselves in big pants and unzipped sports jackets, loud hats and the right kinds of shoes. They wore tight fades, with cuts etched into the paint-thin hairs around the sides of their heads. They spoke and gestured in ways that asserted connections beyond Scarborough, to scenes in New York and L.A. and Kingston. They seemed to have their own language, and I’d watch very carefully when they greeted Francis by touching hands and sharing a private joke. But if I tried to worm my way into their circle, saying “sup” or maybe agreeing too eagerly on any matter (“Yeah, homeboy is indubitably dope!”), there’d be a difficult moment of silence when they’d look at me, and then at Francis, and then back at me, as if they couldn’t understand the relationship. As if they couldn’t figure out what, genetically, had gone so wrong.

  “Hey,” Francis would say to me. “Can you give us a little space?”

  At home, he still helped Mother after work, and she would still touch his face. But increasingly the sympathies that had existed between them strained, and an unspoken irritability and tension seemed to grow with each passing day. And now, when she touched his body, it was often rough, to indicate the lack of “respectability” and “plain civilization” he signalled through hair and clothes and posture. But always the biggest fight was about school. Like me, Francis had years ago been streamed out of an academic program into a basic one. He stayed cool about the whole thing. His new-found disinterest in school perfectly countered its apparent disinterest in him. But in his last year of high school he told a teacher to fuck off, and he was expelled with threats to call the police. “Your one and only chance!” Mother repeated over and over again.

  Francis never went back to school. He got a series of temporary jobs and quietly added groceries to the fridge. He worked hard to prove he wasn’t frittering his life away, and he came home looking almost as worn out as our mother, yet this only irritated her more. And then, that summer, just as you could sense the heat coming, the hostility between them erupted. Mother had been taken aside by a neighbour and informed that Francis was spending all his spare time at Desirea’s, a barbershop filled with boys apparently possessing records.

  “Deny this!” Mother screamed. “Deny to my face that you spend time there! Deny these boys are known to police!”

  Francis had long since learned not to argue directly with Mother. He appeared to listen while never perfectly meeting her eyes, and in this way acted neither foolishly aloof nor confrontational. But this time, as she stood dripping in her coat, Francis’s technique didn’t work. He would not ignore her, Mother warned. He would not get away with pretending nothing was happening.

  “You are my son!” she yelled. “You will never be a criminal.”

  Maybe it was the way Mother pronounced the word, briefly stepping out of the Queen’s English and into the music of her Trinidadian accent. Cri-mi-nal. Or maybe it was something else, some creeping sense of unfairness or inevitability. But Francis laughed. For a moment, Mother just stared. The sharp brass door key forgotten in her hand when she struck him across the face.

  Silence as Francis slowly brought up his hand to touch his cheek. His eyes blinking with hurt and surprise, a thin red line welling on his skin. Until his eyes changed and he smiled. As if this, somehow, were a victory.

  —

  A month later, an enveloping heat arrived, a physical oppression from which none could escape. Nature carrying on like the sort of thug you only hear about. In the early morning it was a menacing red haze. By the afternoon it was a syrup misery in the air, suffocating your will, making even breathing difficult. Even at night there was no relief, and the heat cooked up all day within our homes made staying there unbearable. One evening Mother came back from work and went straight to her bedroom, her hair stuck with sweat to her forehead, ignoring the glass of water Francis had discreetly set out for her. After she closed the door behind her, Francis asked me to step outside to talk.

  We walked to an abandoned parking lot not too far, within sight of the concrete apartment towers near our home, the MacDonald, the Scott, the ones just numbered. Some younger kids on bikes were hanging out in the parking lot. One of them raised his hand shyly towards Francis, the way a boy sometimes does to an older boy who has managed to win himself a reputation, but Francis ignored him and the kid went back to joking with his friends.

  “I’m going away,” Francis told me.

  “What? Where? When?”

  “Soon. A couple weeks, maybe. I’m working on the details.”

  “What about Mother?” I asked him.

  “I’ll tell her soon,” Francis said. “She’ll understand.”

  “But she needs your help.”

  “You help her out too. She’ll be all right. There’ll be one less mouth to feed.”

  “But she relies on you.”

  “Come on, Michael,” he told me. “I wouldn’t just abandon her. I’ll send her money. And she’s strong. She’s survived stuff we don’t even know about.”

  He breathed out and shook his head, and he looked at the apartment towers, their darkened windows, lights kept low during the heat wave. And I remember in that moment feeling so haunted by the sight. As if through magic a whole neighbourhood had been made to disappear. As if a power existed to do such a thing.

  —

  Earlier that week, we’d heard there’d been trouble in the Park. A dispute among some young men that had amplified into a beating. Not a showy brag of a beating, a bit of roughing up with loud threats thrown in, maybe the flash of a weapon, fake or not, but a real beating. Some guy getting whaled on hard by a group of boys, his ribs broken, his fingers stomped, his hair doused with lighter fluid and set on fire, thin blue in the dark. “A halo,” Anton had told us. His skin-teeth smile.

  Francis and I both knew better than to believe every fool story about our neighbourhood someone told us, even a boy like Anton, who had lately turned into a petty dealer with a small bit of real knowing. But on that night, as my brother and I returned to our block, we sharpened when we saw a bunch of guys we didn’t recognize hanging out in the roundabout of our complex. They were shouting at one another. “Kill you fool.” “Yeah. Step to me.” Someone shouted from a balcony, “We’ve called the cops already. The cops are coming,” but the shouting only grew louder and more threatening.

  Don’t touch me, punk.

  Fucking pussy. Faggot.

  Yeah, nigga, you want some? You want some, bitch?

  We quickened our steps and cut wide away from them
. But as we turned the corner of our building, we heard it. A short bang like a car backfiring, a sound almost ordinary. We heard another bang, and then a bunch very quick after that, unmistakable, not ordinary at all. There were a few more shots around us, the sudden splintering of bricks a few yards away, a frog of asphalt leaping from the ground. We should have moved, but we didn’t. Even when we heard more shots. And then from around the corner of our building footsteps running towards us. He had just turned into our view when there was another shot, and a sound like a pumpkin dropped from a balcony at Halloween, and the runner fell.

  It was Anton. I could tell this from his navy blue track suit, even though his face was turned away. He was making soft animal noises and a wet pink balloon seemed to leak from his head. I began to pull away, even as Francis went closer to look. He bent over the body. He reached to touch Anton’s face and then pulled his hand back as if burned.

  “Francis,” I whispered.

  Another gunshot, but my brother didn’t move. He looked at his hand, and tried to wipe something off it on to his pants. I called to him again. Then another shot, more yelling.

  “Francis,” I tried again.

  And only when we heard the wail of a siren did he turn to me. His face shocked white in the brittle security light.

  Run, he told me. No sound, just the shape of the word in his mouth.

  —

  We hadn’t got very far when a cop car raced past us, followed by another that U-turned and screeched to a halt just behind us with a rubber stink. The sounds of doors opening and of commands, loud, urgent. Booted feet upon the sidewalk running towards us, and now a second feeling of terror, as if welling up from some old dark dream.

  We had been stopped by the cops before. There was a routine to it all: we knew that if you carefully played along you’d eventually be released, if not with your dignity, then at least with your skin. But that night we sensed an urgency we hadn’t experienced before. With the blinding headlights upon me, I couldn’t process the commands. I noticed Francis with his hands behind his head, and I realized that I ought to do the same, but I couldn’t. I felt a cop grab my shoulder and yank. I heard Francis say “hey” as he reached instinctively for me.