“Good. Fuck him. That’s good. All this time I was worried he would get to you.”
Andre’s shoulders relaxed. Henry closed his eyes and tried to envision the same thing he knew Andre was envisioning: a past in which Henry really did have the upper hand, in which, at twelve, he learned to outsmart their father, overcoming him with his superior wit like some kind of Robin Hood.
Finding he couldn’t bring himself to unravel this fantasy for his brother, Henry opened his eyes. Henry had the same fantasy about how things were going for Frankie.
“Do you have a house in Prague?” he asked.
“No. An apartment.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
Andre laughed. Henry watched as he pulled a flattened red-and-white package from his jacket pocket, pinched the package open and drew a cigarette from it. “No,” he said, lighting it. He pulled on the cigarette, and the ember brightened. His brother seemed to be considering something carefully, inhaling and peeling the corners of the label on his beer.
“There is this one girl,” he said. “Well, actually, there are two girls, but one of them, one of them is like … a mermaid. She has this real long upper body.” Andre framed his own torso with his hands, one at his neck and one at his crotch, the one at his crotch still pinching the cigarette between its two fingers. “And she’s skinny on top, and her boobs are kind of small, but nice … like scoops of ice cream. But her butt is huge, and then her legs go back to being skinny. I’m telling you, if she had a tail, she’d be a mermaid.”
Andre tore the label from his beer now and crinkled it into a ball. He held it in his fist for a moment before flicking it across the yard.
“But she’s not your girlfriend?”
Andre shook his head. “No. She and the other one, they’re more like friends. We hang out together sometimes. And sometimes if they get into trouble, I’m there to help them out.”
Henry twisted to face Andre. “What kind of trouble?”
His brother looked straight ahead, took another long drag from his cigarette, and the smoke floated from his mouth as he spoke. “Well, you know. Men over there are even bigger assholes than they are here. They give the girls a hard time, sometimes. And I take care of it.”
Andre still didn’t look at him. It took Henry a long, awkward space of time before he figured out what kind of trouble these girls might be in with men. “You’re a pimp?”
Andre laughed again, nervously now. “No, no. I never take their money. They offer it to me, but I never take it. I don’t do it for the money. I do it for the girl. I do it for Ice Cream Boobs.” He took a deep breath and exhaled a gray cloud. “But sometimes … the guys I go after. They have money. And I take it if they have it. Give it to the girls if the dude didn’t pay them or something. I keep the rest. I figure … I figure that’s fair.”
An image flashed through Henry’s mind of his brother bloodying someone’s face, smashing it beyond recognition. He thought of him taking a wallet, dragging a motionless body into a river, and tried to reconcile this image with the face in front of him.
Andre pushed him, and because Henry was stuck in these murky thoughts, he lost his balance.
“Quit looking at me like that,” said Andre. “If you’re thinking I’m running around killing people, I don’t. I never killed nobody.” He took a drink of his beer. “Not even if they really deserved it. Which you know they do, little brother. You know sometimes they deserve it.”
Henry settled back on the grass. Night had crept in while they’d been talking. Henry could see the faint shapes of the moon and a bright star. Here, this is the same sky we watched for lights as children, Henry thought. Of course. Of course you don’t kill people.
“You remember the UFO?” Henry asked.
Andre hesitated. “Yes,” he said.
“I used to look for it. I waited for it,” Henry said. “To beam me up, I guess.”
“Did you ever see it?” asked Andre. “After I moved away? Did it come?”
“Naw.”
“Oh. So it never came back.”
“It probably came back. I just never saw it.”
Andre rubbed the back of his neck, seeming distracted, and Andre-as-a-man looked more like Andre-as-a-boy than he had since he arrived. Henry reached over and poked him. Andre whacked his hand away.
“You’re making a joke out of it. It was as real as anything I’ve ever seen and I’ve never met anyone who completely believes me about it, because no one has ever seen what I saw.”
Henry rolled over so that he was lying on his belly. “Dude, lots of people have seen what you saw. There’s police reports and blurry pictures and—”
“Yeah, but they didn’t see exactly what I saw. And besides, half those people taking blurry pictures really are crazy. Which means that the sane ones still probably think I’m crazy ’cause that’s the sane thing to think when somebody’s like ‘Oh, I saw a big fucking alien ship last night and it talked to me.’”
“It talked to you?”
“Sort of.”
“Oh. Well, I never saw it but I still believe you. There’s weird shit in the world.”
“Pretty sure that’s what Mom said, when I told her. First she said, ‘It was probably a plane.’ But when I swore up and down it wasn’t, she said something like that: ‘There’s weird shit in the world. Weird shit and bad shit and you just gotta shut your ears and hum. ’Cause it ain’t goin’ away.’”
“Sounds like her.”
Andre snorted. “Yeah.”
From inside Caleb’s house, Henry heard dishes clanking against each other as they were pulled from a cabinet.
Andre put his beer down, then. He pulled Henry up by his shoulders so that he was sitting upright on Caleb’s lawn. “Look at this,” he said. He touched his tongue to the tip of his nose.
“Yeah, that’s great, Andre. You should join the circus, too.”
He sucked his tongue back in. “The reason I can do that is because of the UFOs. ’Cause I told you, and you didn’t say anything. And I told Mom, and she told me to hum. But then I told Dad, and Dad got pissed because he thought I was … I don’t even know what he thought. Like I was trying to make a fool of him? Make him believe something that wasn’t true and then laugh at him? Who knows?”
“I get it,” Henry said, pushing his brother away. Andre didn’t try to hold on to him. His hands fell limp at his sides.
“That little string of skin under your tongue that keeps your tongue attached to the bottom of your mouth? It got cut clean through. I guess on my teeth,” said Andre. His hand hovered around his jaw as if he still had to protect it. “He hit me that hard.”
Henry put his hands over his face. He couldn’t look at Andre. “I know, I know, I know,” he said. When he lowered his hands, Andre was still crouching there. Patient. He’d been prepared for this reaction.
“Will you chill out?” he said. “It’s fine. You were like … seven? I get it. What were you gonna do about that, y’know? I get it. But sometimes I think, like, what the fuck? What the fuck was that all about? I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t even bother mentioning it. My mouth was all messed up. Nobody said anything.”
Andre stood then and straightened his jacket.
“Well, what do you want me to do about it now?” said Henry, in a voice that was louder than he wanted it to be.
“I don’t know,” Andre said. “Nothing.”
The screen door of Caleb’s house swung open. Inside, Kylie stood, holding the door open with one freckled arm. Andre startled but recovered and smiled at Kylie, teeth and all. Kylie did not smile back. Henry wondered if she might have seen Andre jerk him up from the ground.
“Adrienne told me to ask if you guys needed anything,” she said.
“No. We’re just jawing,” said Henry.
She glared at his brother. “Okay. I’m sleeping on the couch.”
“You should sleep in the guest bed,” said Henry.
“That’s where you’re sl
eeping,” said Kylie.
“Nah, I’m fine on the couch.”
“You’re a light sleeper. I’m not.” She could not seem to keep her eyes off Andre as she spoke, and Henry swore that, for all the times he’d pissed off Kylie, she had never looked at him with the kind of distrust with which she watched his brother.
Henry conceded to sleeping in the guest bed, but she still lingered, propped against the door frame.
“Listen,” she said. “I told Caleb about Lorne and the horse. He’s going to find a place for the animals as soon as he can, but he won’t say anything to Lorne before that. He doesn’t want to make him more … agitated, I guess.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t like it. I’m afraid he’ll go after her again.”
“We’ll check on her,” Henry said. “Thanks for letting me sleep in the bed.”
She reluctantly withdrew the arm that held the screen door open. “Yeah. No sweat.”
When she was gone, Henry looked back at his brother. He was smirking, drawing another cigarette from the package in his pocket. “No introduction, huh? Is that the giant’s daughter?”
“No. My costar. Kylie.”
“Costar,” he mumbled. “You queer.”
“Shut up, Andre.”
His brother shrugged. “She knows how you sleep. I guess that’s costar business, huh?” His lips pressed around his cigarette. He seemed amused by Henry, even if he was still angry.
Andre would not stay long. He would be going back to working in the factory in Prague, to championing prostitutes, one with the body of a mermaid. Henry tried to come up with something that his brother wanted to hear, so that Andre would leave still feeling a little amused, a little curious. So maybe he would come back again.
“I believed you,” said Henry. “Everything you said, I believe it, even though I never saw the UFO you saw. I’ve seen things. I know they’re real. I just didn’t know what to tell you at the time. You were scared of it, and you weren’t scared of anything. That freaked me out.”
Andre smiled, then lowered his head. All around them things hushed. Children and dogs went inside for the evening. The sky had become a dark, velvety blue, and it was a quiet few minutes between the end of the evening sounds and the beginning of the night ones: trucks starting and music drifting from car windows, the occasional howl of a cat.
“Remember that thing I asked you about? When I wrote you?”
Henry had known this was coming but he wasn’t ready for it. Andre had asked if Henry would go back to their house with him, which Henry assumed meant he wanted to visit Frankie and their father. Henry’s heart sprinted at the very idea; as if the prospect of seeing his brother and father again wasn’t frightening enough, putting Andre and his father together in a room would be inviting disaster.
“I hate to ask. I don’t know what happened after I left. What reasons you had to leave. But I have to get a hold on this. I can’t stop my mind from trying to get to her. It keeps reeling and reeling, like a fishing rod. It’s just a habit now. Get up in the morning, turn the reel. Have breakfast, turn the reel, walk to work, turn the reel. Eventually, you’ll get to the end, right? She’ll be on the end of the line. But she’s not,” he said.
Andre remembered the beer he’d abandoned and took it up again, disposing of about half of it in one swallow. “You can reel and reel until your arm goes numb, and she won’t be there,” he said. “But I can’t stop reeling. My mind won’t stop. I can’t remember what she looked like. I can’t remember what she sounded like. But when she stopped breathing—I remember that. I wake up at night, feeling that …”
Emptiness, thought Henry. Like a sky without stars. His brother woke up to this emptiness, in a dark, foreign city, touching the cold charm at his wrist.
“If I could just get one thing. One little picture. I feel like I could stop,” he said. “And her stuff is still there. I know it is.”
When Henry didn’t reply, Andre polished off his beer. He studied the bottle in his hand, waiting.
Henry had been positive that when his brother asked this, his answer would be no. He could not leave Frankie twice. He’d done it once, because he was told by the only man he’d ever trusted, that by doing so, he could save his own life. He had been uncertain, since that day, whether his life was worth saving. Not sticking up for Andre, that was one thing. Cutting out on Frankie, that was entirely another.
When Henry still didn’t answer, Andre assumed that he wouldn’t. “Okay,” he said and gave a little laugh. “I can’t say I blame you.”
He held up a finger, stored his cigarette between his lips, and fished around in the breast pocket of his jacket. “I brought this for you,” he said, pulling a folded-up postcard from his jacket pocket. He handed it to Henry.
He unfolded the card. There was a picture on it of what looked like a chandelier in a church. Henry pulled the card closer to his face and saw that where the lights of a chandelier would be, here there were human skulls. The arms of the chandelier were made up of pelvic bones, each hung with a femur that dangled from the arc of pelvises. There were other bones that decorated the chandelier, too, pieces of spinal column, fine collarbones and ribs. There were pillars on the floor of this church made of bone as well, tiered skulls capped with fleshy sculpted cherubs. Drooping from the ceiling of the building was a garland of skulls and what looked like humeri, upper arm bones.
“Is this the church you play football outside of?”
“No. That’s in the city. This is in Kutná Hora,” he said. It was strange to hear the name of this place coming from his brother’s mouth, in the original accent he learned it in. “It looks normal from the outside, but on the inside, it’s all made of the bones of people who died of the plague. It’s psycho that someone would think to make something like that. But it looks kind of cool.”
All those people, Henry thought, taken apart and rearranged, sculpted into one body, one home for God to live in. His brother saw this and thought of him. He had brought him a gift.
“I’m glad Adrienne got hold of you,” Henry said.
“It was the guy.”
“What?”
“It was the guy who wrote me. Caleb? He’s not too bad.”
“Oh. And you came right here?”
Andre looked perplexed. “Well. Yeah. I mean, what if I never found you again?”
THE BROTHER LEFT FOR THE night, back to his hotel, and Adrienne was glad to see him go. He was not a frightening person, not like Curtis, but the brother stirred the air in the wrong direction.
She hadn’t gotten a chance to speak to Henry since he returned, because he’d been with his brother all day. She had a head full of things to tell him that she’d been mulling over since the night he’d ditched the circus and driven to see her. About his family. About the two of them. She had the words now to explain that she had hoped someone would come into her life who needed her, not as a lover, but as a guide. How she wished he would be that person. She also had the words to tell him, gently, that he may be wrong about what caused his mother to pass away so young. Adrienne had held these words in for weeks.
That evening, she, Kylie, and Caleb sat in the living room while Henry showered. Caleb was thumbing through a manila file folder containing names: names of the owners of venues they had rented, names of other circus managers, names of performers he hadn’t hired. Kylie and Adrienne read magazines and channel-surfed.
When Henry walked out of their bathroom with a wet head and tired eyes and waved “good-night,” Adrienne almost waylaid him.
“Hey, Henry,” she said.
“What?”
Caleb’s head whipped around and he caught her eye with a look that said What are you, crazy? And he was right, of course.
“Never mind. Sleep well,” she said.
Henry raised an eyebrow. “You’re a head case sometimes,” he said. “Night.”
Henry went to bed and the rest of them sat like that for about an hour before Kylie passed out cold on t
he couch, a beauty magazine across her chest. Adrienne felt obliged to leave the room so that she could turn the lights off for Kylie but found that feeling of obligation not unpleasant. She had plans that involved leaving anyway, so she ushered Caleb to the kitchen to work, and left the house, clicking off the lamp as she went.
She met Azi at a diner, not three blocks away, where they sat down for a cup of cheap coffee and a long chat.
More Notes For A Show About An Angel
If you want to be a great clown, at some point in your career, you have to take an epic Humpty Dumpty–grade fall. In Project A, Jackie Chan falls sixty feet from the big hand of a clock tower, just like Harold Lloyd in that other movie that I can’t remember the name of (sorry, Christiakov). He’s dangling on the hand of the clock and he’s got that face, the corners of his mouth pulled back in a grimace so you can see every tooth in his mouth. He must have been scared to death. He must have known he was going to break something taking a fall like that. But he’s in character even after he slips. He doesn’t look truly scared. He looks clown-scared.
That’s why when Jackie Chan gets up in the morning, he thinks, Today is a great day, because I am fucking Jackie Chan and I am amazing! Because he sucked it up and fell, because he’s pulled every muscle in his body and broken every bone, and now he’s famous, he’s rich, and everyone loves him.
And I’ve been thinking: I don’t like watching kung fu movies because I like to see people get hurt. I like watching them because I like to see people come back from it. You fall from a clock tower, you get pummeled by gangsters, you get bruised and dirty—and then you stand up, you get your fists of flame. You’ve got tears in your eyes and a howl in your mouth, and you kick some ass. Seeing this, it gives a person a certain feeling. It’s like being set yourself free, like everything that weighs on you is just the silly preamble to an amazing comeback.
Maybe people feel this way about comedy, too. What if your theory is wrong, Christiakov? What if people don’t want blood, but they need it to get that other thing that sets them free?
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