My Brother's Passion

by D. James Smith

  Pretty soon Erin Bleacher walked out to the gate, wearing a gray poncho, huge as he was, murder in a tent, walking towards us. He didn’t say anything, just unlocked the gate, slung the chain off it, that chain ringing loud, and him wrapping it slowly round his fist. And then the cars started coming. They came slow up the street, backed up, bumpers close, headlights on, slow as a funeral. And those cars had most everyone we knew in them. Folks I’d known in our house, folks from church, and Jack’s Place. They kept their faces to themselves, eyes straight ahead, not looking at my dad, those few standing with him next to the road.

  I wanted to shout what are you boys doing, what’s wrong with you, what was the reason you’re doing what you’re doing, but I did not. And neither did my dad or those few he had. It wasn’t long I could watch those men in their cars, so I looked at my dad. He was balled up, worry and more, flicking fast over him, the way shadows work on a face that’s staring into a fire, maybe a fire that’s burning your house down, except that day it was cold and everything backwards so those shadows were cold. He’d become strange, surely, eyes about to cross, and he saw me looking up at him and a terrible expression closed his face in a way it’d never done before, trying to keep secret what it was that he felt. I glanced down at my tennis shoes and scuffed them along the sidewalk and glanced back. And I saw he was shamed that I knew him, that I was trying to play that I didn’t. That’d never happened. I knew we were both different then, though I didn’t understand that it wasn’t my fault, that we’d just begun what we must, that long growing away from each other.

  32

  It should be troublesome seeing one still ripe in his age down like that, dead, dead as he was, there in the alley, out back of Jack’s Place. I suppose I didn’t let myself come up very close to it in my mind, didn’t let it into myself, in any way heart-sure, as right then I’d had enough of that. It was on that very afternoon Erin Bleacher came by for a drink after his lunch and just before he would go back to the gate at the plant when the shift would break and the men go home. They said somebody surely hit him, used a hammer or pry bar, but they didn’t know who. There were only a few that were there in the rain, looking down on him when I came up with my papers and pressed through to see. The back of his head was cracked open, some of his brain outside of the skull, a clump of it, packed tight as some elbow macaroni you might pull, cold from the fridge. Those curled bits edged in red.

  Yet it had some effect on me because I went home directly. I dropped my canvas bag full of papers on the back porch, a few spilling out. I remember looking down on them, watching the ink blot in that rain and run off before I went in. In the kitchen, I took a dishtowel and roughed it over my head, though it wasn’t any use, and I knew that as I was dripping steady, little puddles forming up at my feet.

  The rain was coming hard by then. Standing there in the kitchen, I listened to the wind throw it sure as tacks, against the house and the windows. I stood there a while, not thinking of anything at all, just hearing the rain, letting it fill me up with its sound. It was a while before I knew why I’d come home. It was the footsteps coming up from the basement that told me. I knew who it was.

  33

  For a half-second there was surprise splashed like milk over his face when he walked into the kitchen and saw me standing near the sink, back to the window, waiting. He stopped and stood looking at me. He was going out ’cause he had his jacket on and an olive green fishing cap, one of those with the extra-long bill. But he waited on me. Knew I would speak.

  “You do that to Erin Bleacher?” I said flat out.

  “Who cares if I did?” He looked exhausted and riled, whipped up and careful at the same time.

  “You do it?’ I asked, again.

  “Who’d say he didn’t deserve it?”

  “How come you know what he deserves?”

  He was still looking at me, in spite of the fact that his eyes were fading in and out, seeing me plain and then shifting, unfocused, a little fuzzy, the way a radio station you might dial in at night gets, one that’s skipped in across the sky—there and then not. And then I got mad. I hated him, then. He’d ruined himself and done it on purpose and now he was lost. They wouldn’t let him get away with what he’d done. Still he stood there. He didn’t have a thing to say to me, but he stood there anyway, letting me hate him for awhile, making himself stand there like some kind of penance, giving me that little bit. Even that seemed selfish to me. I grabbed hold of one of the those kitchen chairs there and slammed it over onto the linoleum. My eyes caught sight of my notebook on the counter, and I grabbed it, too, and started tearing it up, ripping out all the pages and throwing them down, half-shredded and crumpled. Then the wind was out of me. “Just … get out of here, Glen,” is what I finally said, looking at the mess on the floor and then at him

  You’d think I’d had hit him. He was pitiful and wasted in my sight. He waited for more, but I didn’t have it so he crossed the room and opened the back door and went out, the door open for a second so the smell of the rain blew in, old as dirt, rotting things now, the room stinking up with the smell it.

  34

  I didn’t need to look. I knew what he’d come for, what he’d wanted in the basement. I knew he didn’t have any car, and I knew it would take some time for him to get out to her place. I went into the living room, still dripping, and switched on the television, dialing the sound down. Other than the blue light twitching over the walls there was no light on in there. I sat down on the davenport and gave things some thought. Thought, OK this is some kind of terrible chess and what is my move, what’s there on the board? Nobody knew right then it was him that killed Erin Bleacher. In fact, even I didn’t know that for certain, though I knew from his face. If I called the police, what then? It was late, the dark already starting to crawl at the windows. My folks would be home pretty soon. But they had no power over him.

  That’s when I thought of Uncle Aquilla. He’d no love for either Glen or that woman, but he might want to stop him for reasons of his own. He was old, but still strong. I knew that. He had that phony pride big men have in their size, though all pride is phony is what Pastor Jenson said, and he was right in his way, most of the time. That pride might make him go up against Glen. I looked at the TV and saw Walter Cronkite with his tired eyes, full of compassion for what he had to say, his lips moving silently, his mouth saying Where’s your brother? over and over, though I knew those were words in my own head. Then some shots of a trailer park in Florida came on. A hurricane, I guess. Some close-ups of a housewife doubled-over and crying, what was her house spread out behind her like shredded paper, showing there’s lots that’s bigger than men in this world. I had to get out of the house.

  I ran down the block, the wind and the wet scissoring cold round my ears, the sky failing fast, the storm giving it the look of bath water gone dirty. The streetlamp, necked out from a telephone pole on the corner, had already come on, that glass, a big amber coughdrop, glowing weak. I ran all the way so when I came on his house I was winded for sure, and I slipped and went down on my knees on the lawn, ribbons of breath going in and out of me sharp. But I could hear him anyway, banging on the front door for Uncle Aquilla to come on and get his fat ass out. It was Glen, and that was confusion as to what he was doing there.

  That door exploded inward, and my aunt stuck her head out and told Glen to get off the porch, right now, lor-dy sakes. I think that surprised Glen because he backed up some, sort of stumbling off to the side, stepping back past those white columns that stood on each side of the porch. Then Uncle Aquilla stepped out in front of my aunt and shoved her back inside with one of his arms. But she wouldn’t go and was fighting him, so he turned round to push her back indoors, and that’s when Glen shot him. Shot him once with that old .38. He was, Glen was, crouching there, just next to the porch, off to the side, so when he shot, that little slug caught Uncle Aquilla smack in the side of his butt and spun him round, and he went down, saying, Oh shit. But it wasn’t so much th
at he said it as it was punched out of him, like the air smacked out of a paper bag you’d have blown up. Glen looked amazed and turned around and ran up the side of the house along the drive, out of my sight, and it didn’t seem long at all he was gone, just a few seconds of Uncle Aquilla moaning and trying to roll himself over and trying to tell to my aunt, who was screaming awful, that he was alright. Then my uncle’s Chevy two-ton work truck came squealing down the drive, Glen driving it backwards right out into the street where it slid on the slick pavement in a fast half-circle. He threw it into first, the gears crunching hard, and peeled out of there, quick. I didn’t move until then. I didn’t say anything to them there on the porch. They never even took notice of me. I just got up and ran.

  35

  I felt some big something coming up from behind me and turned and saw headlights stabbing that darkness, the rain snowing pale like locusts in the beams. I stopped walking and waited. My legs hurt from the running. I was out a mile or more past our block, in country, on the two-lane of blacktop that went up past her place. The car slowed and pulled onto the shoulder. I stepped over to it as the window came down and saw young Mr. Perch looking out at me, blinking back bits of rain that strayed in to hit him. He didn’t say anything, just reached round to unlock the rear door. I nodded, stepped back, and climbed in.

  The car was warm and stuffy after being out in the rain. Mr. Cobley and young Mr. Perch had turned round in their seats to get a look at me. “I’m going out to my passion, my brother’s passion,” I said in answer to their stares. They turned to glance at one another and then after a second when something passed between them, they both laughed some kind of smart chuckle. Young Perch twisted back toward me again, his eyes flicking over me, smiling like a kid who’s been naughty. It was quiet and dark in that car except for the push-button radio glowing on the dash and Peggy Lee singing Is That All There Is? because that was their sort of station, I guessed. It was strange them out driving in the storm same as if it was a holiday. “Glen’s got a .38 revolver,” I said. That stopped the smiling.

  Yes, I told them Glen was my brother, that’s right, the one back from the Marines, but that’s all I would give them except that this was strictly family, and I would appreciate the ride and could they get going, please. They had a spat then. Mr. Cobley had wanted to take me home or downtown to the police. Oh, Val, think how that will look, Young Percy had said. I don’t give a good goddamn how it looks is what Mr. Cobley, whose first name was Val, had shot back. I noticed he’d slurred his words some. To that Young Percy had stuck out his bottom lip and and crossed his arms and sunk down in his seat. Oh, and since when?

  The windows had steamed up and Mr. Cobley rolled a window down and smeared messily at the inside of the windshield with a leather driving glove. That all you want, pumpkin? Is a ride? Yes, sir that would do and let’s go, could we? And so we did. I had to show them where to stop as there were no lights showing from her house, but I knew where it was from that mailbox that was on top of a post planted in a tire filled with cement at the bottom of her drive. Then those two pulled away, red taillights shrinking like comets, swallowed back whole into the storm, like the secret they were.

  36

  Lightning branched in the distance, the sky flicking on, sudden, catching the raindrops licking down like millions of stars rushing the earth, then all darkness again. I worked my way up that mud drive and then set out across the grass that grew round her place. I tripped and cracked my knee hard on a rock, and maybe I wet myself then ’cause a warmth slipped down along one of my thighs, and the sky split light again quick, and I saw in a second that held in my head for a long moment what must’ve been a pheasant or grouse flushing up like a shadow from the grass, swimming, heavy through the air to disappear.

  The little house was black. I felt my way up onto the porch and put my ear to the door and listened, but there wasn’t any sound I could hear, especially with the drumming of the rain and the wind shush, shushing through the trees. I knocked hard as I could, ’til my knuckles hurt, and I tried seeing in through the windows but there was all dimness inside and out.

  I decided to go round the back so I slid my fingers along the wood side of the house to keep my balance in the dark, my boots sinking in the earth as I went.

  That ground there was mostly clay and it stuck to my boots and with every step my boots grew bigger and more heavy with it. When I came round the back I could just make out the Chevy two-ton and so knew he was there. It was only three big steps up the back porch. I pulled back the screen door that wasn’t locked and tried looking in through the back door that was half window, but there was no luck in that. Then the sky boomed and lit up again, and I saw he was in there, sitting on the couch.

  I dug into the coin pocket of my jeans and found a quarter. I clicked it against that glass until I thought it might break. Nothing. I was getting tired and I was wet and I was scared. I was angry, too, so I slammed my shoulder into the door and it gave way easily, that wood mush, and I fell in onto the floor. I lay there catching up on myself, on my surprise, feeling the water running off me all around. I struggled up and shut the door, but it didn’t seem to want to shut anymore as its latch was broken so I let it be, the wind pulling and pushing it back and forth.

  A match struck and tore open a small hole in that room that was dark as a pocket. I saw Glen’s face. He was lighting a cigarette. I just watched for a moment as the red end of that smoke traced back and forth from his face to his knee in a slow arc. “Where is she?” I said, my voice striking the air sharply in a way that surprised me. The back door slammed shut and I winced. Then I heard him, chuckling. A funny, soft, rattling laugh.

  “You think I came here to hurt her.” He paused. “That’s it, isn’t it?” And he made that funny sound again, a sound like cellophane bubbles slipping up and popping in the back of his throat. “She left two days ago.” His voice hoarse.

  I came closer, following the sound of it until I could hear him breathing that smoke in and out. His hand was resting on his knee, cigarette glowing like a ruby on his finger. “How come you didn’t go with her?”

  The cigarette swung up quickly to his face where it pulsed as he pulled on it. “Never wanted me, Dave. That’s the whole of it.” No sound then except the weather busy outside.

  “Why’d you shoot Uncle Aquilla?” I said, though I knew well enough that she must have told him what he’d done, what I’d seen myself all that time back. And I wasn’t mad with him anymore. That had gone out of me all of itself.

  “You know she loved him. She told me that.”

  “Uncle Aquilla?”

  “No.” And he tried to laugh but only a weak cough came.

  “Who did she love?”

  “Not me,” he said, slow, as if still trying to get his mind around the idea.

  He dropped his smoke to the floor and must have stamped it out as the little bud of red that it was disappeared. I stared at the floor where it had been. When he spoke again his voice came from the other side of the room, near the front window and it startled me that he’d moved. “You get home,” he said, flatly.

  “You leaving Glen? You are. I can tell. You got to take me, too. You got to, Glen.” I was pleading. I was sounding like a kid and I didn’t care, just so as he understood.

  “Go on home.” His voice soft, though with no feeling, coming again from the other side of the room and also from how many miles out I couldn’t count. I thought it could be as far as those birds he’d told me about once, the ones that go up in summer and don’t ever come down. Then he was there in front of me, and he pulled me in to himself slowly, my head in his shirt, the smell of tobacco, my head pressed in at his belly so close I could feel him breathing, but he wasn’t really there, though we stood there in the middle of the room, the whole world spinning out around us, the two of us, still, in the center of things, outside that rain whipping round, outside those trees held tight by the ground, their tops thrashing back and forth in the wind.

 
; And then he grabbed my coat, and dragged the whole weight of me, sudden and quick, to the front door and with one motion opened it and flung me out where I rolled off the porch and down those steps, my hands, thrown out to break my fall, plunging deep in the mud. I struggled up, breathing hard with the shock, the rain coming hard, wind hard, picked up now to a full, chill blow, me standing there all ashudder, as if I was planted, unable to move like one of those trees.

  37

  If someone’s thinking of you right when they die, wouldn’t some part of you get pulled away, too? Seems that could be. I know when someone you know dies some part of all that they were stays in you.

  I was halfway across that open space in front of her house, sinking up to my ankles in mud, when I heard it. One sharp thwack like a branch cracking down. That sound snapped my shoulder blades back just the way they would if someone punched me hard in the back. When I heard that gun, and I knew it was a gun, some part of me flew right out of myself and went over the fields, I don’t know why, all the way home to that great big eucalyptus out back of our place where we’d skinned that deer all that time back. And that part of me came down slow and settled in quietly, folding its wet wings in the dark. Part of me had all the time in the world then and no place to go. That one cocked his head sideways and looked up, eyes, sharp and wild, laddering up through the limbs, watching, with no thought, the sky there that was streaming fast overhead.

  But the other one that I was swung back fast to look at that house. For a long while that one looked before he turned to make his way home and a long ways that was and a very long time it took so that when he got there he was half-dead and just went in through the back door and took off all his clothes and left them pooled on the floor in the kitchen. He took me, the way you might lead a child to bed, climbing the stairs, not stopping at all outside Glen’s door, just took me on in to my room so I could get in and cover myself up and shut my eyes, because there was nothing I wanted anymore, nothing to do, then, but wait on tomorrow.