My Brother’s Passion
D. James Smith
New York
for Glen
1
The first time I saw my brother’s passion was when we drove Glen downtown to the train station. Of course I didn’t know who she was then. We were all in our bus, the ’67 Volkswagen, the only new thing my dad ever bought. Mother was up front, sniffling to herself in the passenger seat, and my dad had his eyes trapped in the rearview mirror, trying to memorize Glen’s face. He never wanted my brother to go, always said something about this thing not being a game, not dominoes, not a theory at all.
We were crossing town quickly that day, turning west at the cathedral where the idolaters gathered every Sunday to look at their statues and get their orders from the pope. On account of my dad, we were Baptists and knew that sweet Jesus had no bargain with priests, that you could give up your own heart yourself to His mercy and get some relief. Even though my brother got saved the week before he shipped out, went down in the mystery and came up sputtering in the glass pool that was built alongside one wall of First Baptist, stood there blinking out at my folks and all the rest of us in our pews, I could see in his eyes that it hadn’t taken, that he’d come up afraid.
We went on west of downtown where things scattered out, shops and industrial buildings and the gray grain silos towering along the tracks. We drove all the way without talking, Glen giving me a wink once in awhile. With his Levis, and his Beatle haircut just beginning to grow long, he looked good, though I wasn’t paying the sort of attention I should’ve on a day like that; mostly I was fiddling with my transistor radio plugged in one ear listening to kids calling in, wanting to hear their sweetheart’s name on the air.
The Stones were getting no satisfaction whatsoever, and Jim Morrison was wishing his baby would light him up over and over, which made me think of the monk, some kind of priest, who’d poured gasoline all over himself right there on CBS. That happened back when I was still a little kid. He did it to himself on a street corner over there, making his whole life into a fire of love for his people. We were all eating in the living room and my dad’s entire head turned pink like salmon when that came on. Made him slam down his fork and just clean leave the room.
Mother was pained, you could tell, because her voice was like glass breaking when she told me to turn off the Magnavox. She didn’t eat any more, just watched Glen, who was maybe fifteen or sixteen back then but already itching to go. He finished off his meat loaf without flinching, trying to show he wasn’t surprised by all that was going on over there.
The monk was all love, my mother explained that night when I couldn’t sleep. Sometimes, love is tricky. She said it wasn’t for free. Said it could ask more from you than you thought when you started out with your love. One thing could fall into another and things could go awful and wrong, I guess, which is the domino theory all over again.
My father would say all this is an old story and not worth the trouble. Say it’s all in the Old Testament should I bother to look. But I say, it never happened to me till it did, and, sometimes, it’s still fresh to the point of hurting, the way things that you need usually are. And there’s some that don’t know and they should as there’s solace in that. The Bible’s still going on every day if you look.
I don’t know what my brother would say if he were still talking. He’s just like those bits of light drilling holes through the roof of our garage and that roof like the top of my head, that light going all the way to my heart and the reason for all that I’m telling.
When we got to the train station, that woman was there, out front, red hair rolled up on her head, holding a cigarette in one hand, fingernails painted the color of cranberries. She was smiling like a sunbeam—even the air around her looking warm—and she was talking to some guy in a rumpled green suit when she glanced at us pulling up to the curb. Her face froze for a second, and, quick as quick, she flicked her blue eyes from my brother to my mom in the front seat. Then she turned and took the green suit by the arm and walked away slowly, and I turned to my brother, trying to see what was what but his face wasn’t telling.
That was Glen’s way, the way of my mother and her people. They’re there every day on the mantle at home in their little rosewood frames, and their faces are smoothed out and their eyes wouldn’t tell you nothing even if you could put torture on them directly. They never show their desire. That’s Asian. That’s smart. That is, if you want to get by in this world. It’s just ignorance if you think otherwise. I know that much.
I know for certain that I wish that when things change, they wouldn’t change for good. I wish we’d never moved away the way we did in the end. I wish we hadn’t had to. I wish I’d never seen all that struggle and killing. I could have never planned on Erin Bleecher being dead or that Jew or on what happened to Uncle Aquilla. And I wish I’d never found my brother the way I finally did. I never set out to understand about desire and the things it’ll make you do when it gets out of hand, starts its burning you up, the way it did all of them.
2
It was October when my brother went off, October when that rain started. Started slow and gentle, sifting down soft as grace, a fine swept rain, clicking on top of the aluminum roof of the carport, the kind of rain that you have to look hard at to actually see. Look hard into the distance, ’cause you can hear it sort of mouthing the puddles and you can feel it settling on your face, but you can’t really see it, unless you angle your eyes so that the little splinters of light catch it and bring it out against the dark needles of a pine, or the flat leaves of the magnolias, or the drooping branches of the eucalyptus, the trees planted up back of our place.
Of course, that was just the start of it. Within a couple of weeks, it was hurtling down without pity, my mother said. Down every day and most nights too, for most of that month. Down in a way everybody said was unusual, down in a way it did only one other time, much later—though I didn’t know that then, that it would rain both times—when my brother went away for good in the end. It came down sogging the ground so that when you walked around, the earth would suck at you, make a sucking sound when you lifted your boots. It’s not supposed to rain much in California, not in the valley because at one time this place was a desert, that is, before it became God’s own miracle, my father would say—irrigation, modern methods of farming. But it did it anyway, in spite of its record, in spite of itself, came down and swelled all the ditches that ran through town, rose in the gutters and crept up on the lawns and lapped at the edges of everyone’s houses.
It made my folks kind of twitchy, cooped up in the house, my mother burning incense for the ancestors, my dad grinding his pipe with his big corn-colored teeth, going out on the front porch to stare at the sky, not wanting to come in, worrying himself more than he should. Not that we farmed—we didn’t have any crop to lose, but it was bad for the town, bad for the P. F. Stanley & Co. Bad for Uncle Aquilla who ran P.F. Stanley, and bad for the men who depended on the tractors and pickers they built.
My father said maybe our troubles were Biblical, but said we’d haul through, said most things work out if you leave them alone, leave them to God, though I wondered why those two things would be the same. Mostly, I remember the tiny sparrows that crowded the big monkeypuzzle just outside of our house who seemed stunned and interrupted and unhappy about the rain. Packed in there close as leaves, they were a whole slickered city of chattering and flicking and unease. And I watched them from my window and hoped for them the best.
3
I wouldn’t shoot a sparrow, though I kept my eyes out for all sorts of birds. Long before that rain ever came, I was used to seeing them, mostly big fat pigeons with shining green throats, strutting around in the gutters that en
ded on our block because ours was the last block before you were in true country—miles and miles of flat open farmland and telephone poles tacked along the roads like toothpicks going out forever. Doves were pretty and their wings made a whistling when they rose off the ground, but they were stupid and easy to shoot, which I did all the time. My rifle was a good one, expensive, with a real wooden stock that shot steel pellets, a real prize as I was still only eleven going on twelve when I got it. My brother gave it to me just before he joined up and went overseas.
There were robins with soft apricot breasts and bluebirds that flickered like blue flames in the bushes. And there were crows. Before my brother went off, it was so dry deer came down from the hills looking for water and something to eat, and he shot one in a cornfield early one morning and strung it up from its hind legs in a eucalyptus that was back of our place. When I got up and came out of the house, I saw it there with its pretty little feet hanging down fine and dainty. My mother walked out there with me and my brother and there were a couple of crows stepping around on its rump being spiteful and noisy. And me and Glen chucked rocks at them till they lifted, pissed-off and rowing away ever so slowly with their pointy black-fingered wings. My mom said softly to Glen, “Honey, hurry up and get that poor thing dressed out and away from my yard.” And my brother nodded to her in his usual way, quiet and willing.
My brother’s face was just like my mother’s, skin the color of peeled almonds and high rounded cheeks, eyes that were narrow and Asian. White niggers I’d heard people whisper downtown, some farmer or salesman or mother with pasty-faced, runny-nosed kids, whisper it just loud enough to be heard, then turn away to study a cantaloupe or onion at the grocery. I looked like my dad, round eyes, blue eyes, thin white skin that flushed red as a brick when we were mad or embarrassed.
My dad said just ignore it when I heard that. He said that was ignorance, that our whole town was mixed—Okies, Italians, Armenians, Mexicans, even Japanese, so being Korean wasn’t really anything different round here. But it troubled me some. My mom was so pretty you’d think they could see it. She was a gentle one, small and usually dressed really smart even when she was around the house in the evenings when she wore her hair down, gleaming black hair, long and showy, silk pajamas, a black robe with a green dragon growing up from her feet.
And the town did look like it had been built by a jumble of people. It spread out without any plan, just one street downtown and some churches and neighborhoods arranged around it with the railroad splitting the whole thing, crooked. Trains stopped traffic most anytime they wanted to when they rumbled through, rusted and loud. At night, you could hear their horns-long, heart-tight, sorrowful sounds. Dad said say what you will but it was better than living in the dirt which he understood on account he was born up in the hills of Tennessee. Glen would say our grandmother on that side, who I’d never seen, used to smoke her own pipe made out of clay, but that could’ve been a lie as he was forever fond of pulling my leg. I suppose I should have resented it, but when he got to telling me a story, letting it circle around on the ceiling before he dropped it down over me like a trick lasso, his eyes would get wet in the corners with laughter, and even when I knew it was my leg getting yanked, I’d let him go on thinking I was younger and dumber than I was just so as to see him happy like that.
Our house had town on one side and country on the other. An orchard of almonds took off from the thick wild grass of our place, and after the almonds a wide ditch for irrigation snaked through a field of grapes and after that there were onions and so on and on.
Uncle Aquilla lived up the street on the other side of us in a big brick house with white shutters. The house had a drive that was blacktopped smooth, and it was edged, too, with brick, and everyone said it looked fine—had a front porch with white columns and one of the few lawns in our whole town that wasn’t Bermuda. Aquilla had long, fine, shiny grass he was proud of. Himself, he was nearly six feet four, a lot bigger than my father. He was shop foreman at the plant and got my dad his job. He was the kind of guy who stopped people talking whenever he came around. Men would sort of shuffle and nod and wait on him to speak which he didn’t do very much. They’d scratch their necks, real thoughtful, and after he’d leave the air would clear up and their faces would soften and somebody or other would crack wise and their laughter would come, quick and relieved.
I knew Uncle Aquilla didn’t think much of my mother ’cause he never came to dinner and we didn’t go over there much, and if we did it was just my dad and me. Even Glen seemed to gall him. Seemed just the sight of him made Aquilla polite as a stranger, mouth puckered up and sour, little pockets of discouragement under his cheeks. I think that sort of thing made my mom fond of Glen especially, kind of weak with him and careful.
That’s why she was gentle as ever with him that morning, about getting rid of that deer, saying, Honey to him, though it was a horror to her, hanging there in her yard. I got to help with that deer. Glen split its belly with his buck knife and the insides slumped out, warm and smoking. “Dave, get me that short-handled ax, will you?” he said so I ran for the shed out back of our garage. I remember that after we’d stripped back the skin, he used the ax to separate the muscles near the bones where the legs joined the body, the ax making a dull chump, chumping sound in the cold. When we first started, I thought that deer was watching us, one big mirror-black eye rolled back like it was curious until I looked closer and saw that there wasn’t anything there, just a clear patch of sky, open and running free in all that dark space.
4
It wasn’t that long before we got letters. They came ever so often. I remember one from South Carolina and then maybe some months later, one from Maryland, Virginia. But I know it was a good long time before we got one from clear overseas, even later when we got an actual phone call coming all those thousands of miles through a cable my dad said was laid out like plumbing on the floor of the ocean. Glen said the heat there was bad as it was at home in the summers except that it wasn’t dry, said the air could cling to your skin like cellophane wrapping, said, That’s the Nam for you. He said not ever to worry, wrote it in a letter, Dave, don’t you worry, I got plenty of buddies here. Say, I bet you’d go crazy about the birds over here, you can’t imagine the colors. Though soon enough I could imagine them, or leastways I tried, because I went to the city library and found a book about the birds they have over there. I got a notebook with thick paper at the five and dime and started in on drawing them, too.
Sometimes I’d dream them all flying around our house, coming to sit in the trees like a hundred colored rags, unfurled and flapping in the breeze. And I’d run around the place thinking, if Glen’s birds were there, then he must be round there somewhere himself, and then I figured out that wasn’t possible so I made up a lie for myself, made it up right in the middle of one of those dreams and kept it the next morning and from then on. And it was this: when the birds showed up that was a sign that, just then, at that very moment, he was over there and thinking about us, imagining us same as I would when I’d picture him.
That’s the kind of lie you can tell to yourself because it’s possibly good as the truth. Otherwise, where would a lie like that come from? You shouldn’t forsake something that comes in your head of its own, comes with that power.
That rain we’d had wasn’t normal. It’s dry most of the time around there. Dry enough that all that water was drunk up pretty soon by the soil In fact, in winter, before the snow in the mountains melted off, the canals in the valley always went dry. I liked to walk down the road till I came to a ditch and then climb down inside and follow it for as long as I could, out to hell and gone, until I got tired or it got dark and I’d have to head home. I got to carrying a flashlight ’cause I’d get so distracted I might not start back until it was pitch black. There was all manner of stuff down there—old mattresses, tires, half rusted-away barrels, dead cats and skunks, even a Ford Model A with all the chrome pitted green and black like abalone and just spring
s for a seat. It was a bombed-out highway I had to myself. They say never walk the canals because you can’t know when the guys running the dam might bleed off water from the lake and you could get drowned, though I never saw that.
I liked to walk off as far as I could and then climb out somewhere I’d never seen, come up in somebody’s field and sneak up on their place and see how they lived. It was a habit I got into, and I can say it put some shame on me, but I couldn’t stop it and figured no one really cared. I’d come up close on a house, crawling on my belly through grass or whatever they were growing, and I’d watch while the sun shriveled up like an old tangerine in the haze on the edge of the world. And the shadows would start stretching, and then they’d step slowly out from the trees, and the lights in the houses would come on, and I could get close enough to peek inside. My heart would start thumping for no reason I know, ’cause the folks in those places weren’t doing much but the usual stuff. But I felt some kind of thrill like I was watching my own little play, the folks moving around in the windows like puppets, and I’d think to myself, I am watching, like God.
5
Glen did what everyone wanted. That was his way. I see there’s those that have to do what others won’t let themselves. The least of things. The hardest. That’s fate. I’d say those that have it, have a loneliness more than most. But Glen didn’t have to do all that he did. What was forbidden and wrong. But, I didn’t know that yet.
I was just waiting for him, spending lots of that time putting a watch and a study on things. Probably that time went by slowly, but I don’t remember most of it, so in my head it was quick. I was growing, which happens without your having to notice it. But I did do some study on things and those I have with me fresh. Some of that study was curiosity, some mischief, and some of it just vanity. In the mirror, I’d see I really was like my father—curly blond hair, clear blue eyes like marbles, a nose that was knobbed round on its end and dotted with blackheads like a strawberry.
My Brother's Passion Page 1