by Rob Thurman
Unless his brother slapped down that ball and crushed it underfoot because he didn’t want to believe.
I smoothed hair I’d already combed out into his usual straight sheen. He let me fold him up on his mattress as I climbed in behind him, pulled his blanket over us and wrapped arms around him.
“I’m here, Cal.”
Silence, and it went on.
“You’re not alone. I’m staying.
“Junior’s dead.” I swallowed, but said it. Cal didn’t trust anything I hadn’t done myself and I had done it. “I killed him. He’s not coming back.
“We’ll leave tomorrow, away from that house and the police, but we need the rest tonight, okay?
“I won’t, I can’t make it up to you. From the first time you told me, I should’ve said screw Junior’s good name and the police. With some things your instincts are better than mine and I fucked up.”
None of my uncustomary cursing got through to him either.
“Cal. .” I tightened my grip on him, wrapped around him as I hadn’t since he was six and had nightmares every night-clowns, evil reindeer, and Grendels. “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t know if he would say anything, if he could say anything, but I heard the faintest of whispers, the barest of exhalations against the skin of my hand tucked under his small chin when he said those first words.
“It made a hole in the world.”
Once he started, he didn’t stop, his voice much younger than eleven. “It made a hole in the world. It made a hole in the world. It made a hole in the world. It made a hole in the world. It made a hole. . ” He turned his head to bury it in the pillow.
I didn’t know what he meant. He could’ve been awake for a few minutes and seen the Grendel start what I finished on Junior, but a hole in the world? I didn’t know. I ran fingers through the long strands of his hair. “I’ll stop it. Whatever it is, I promise I’ll make it go away.”
Pressing a light kiss to the top of his head, wishing he’d punch me for that as he normally did, I murmured, “Love you, little brother.”
There was a shudder and a promise more determined than I could’ve asked for. “Love you, big brother. Forever.” Ferocious in its way, protective almost when that was my job. It was enough to worry me more.
What had he seen?
God, what hadn’t he?
We moved the next day. Packed what little we had and took the bus several states away. We didn’t leave a note for Sophia, but she would find us. She always did. She was like a Grendel that way.
The apartment was cheap and dirty and not fit to live in, which is why it was more or less abandoned until maintenance got around to it. We could squat for a while. It had been three weeks and Cal was back to normal-as normal as my little brother ever was. We’d slept in the same sleeping bag for two weeks before he decided he was eleven and only babies slept with their brothers. I was surprised it took him that long to move to the sleeping bag right next to mine. For all that had happened, Cal was never one to admit he was afraid. . of Grendels, of anything. Two weeks for him was the same as two months for someone else.
It worried me, but he didn’t mention that night in the house, in the attic, and neither did I. I tried. It wasn’t healthy, all the books said, to bottle up that kind of trauma. But when I did make an attempt, it was as if Junior was back with the bleach spray scorching my throat, banishing my voice.
I’d almost gotten Cal killed by not believing him. I couldn’t live with that-so I put it away. What Cal did with it I didn’t ask. I couldn’t without tasting bleach, feeling his blood on my hands, and reliving the terribly satisfying crunch of knife through bone.
I couldn’t talk about it. If I did, I couldn’t be who I needed to be for him. I wouldn’t be strong. I think it would’ve broken me. . for good.
So that’s what I did. Put it away. I wouldn’t take it out again, not as long as I lived.
I hoped.
As for Cal, he seemed fine, not quite cheerful, but. . functional. His ball was bouncing, if not as high and wild as normal. I didn’t know how that could be, that he was walking and talking at all, but that was Cal. I should be grateful and I was. I was more than grateful; I was proud. The deck had been stacked against my little brother since before he was born. He never let that stop him and he never let it beat him. One little boy and he had the strength of a hundred men. I loved him, but I was also. . humbled by him. He was an amazing boy now and he’d be a man to be reckoned with when he grew up. I was fortunate I was the one who would see that. Of all the people in the world, somehow I’d been chosen, and hard as it could be, this life, I’d never give it up. Make it better, yes, but never give up the miracles I got to see on a daily basis. Even on the days I stumbled and didn’t know what to do, I was the luckiest person alive.
I came in the apartment door, ignored the smell of mold from the ceiling that no amount of scrubbing had done away with. It didn’t much matter anyway. The black-green of it matched the carpet. “We start the new school tomorrow. Have you been catching up on what you missed?”
Cal looked up at me from the same math book from a table with the same wobble and, terrifyingly, wearing the same casual expression. The deja vu was a punch in the stomach. “Mrs. Kessler is a cannibal.”
Mrs. Kessler? Who had painted her door cotton candy pink, who was seventy at least and baked cookies for everyone on the floor? That Mrs. Kessler? Yet, she did eat a lot of what looked like pork sandwiches in that rocker on her tiny balcony. I headed immediately for the scarred baseball bat propped in the corner.
Cal laughed. “Sucker.” It was his first real laugh since Junior’s attic. His first true laugh, first true grin, and it was worth being fooled for that. Of course he still had to pay. That was how brothers did it. I chased him out the door and down the hall. I echoed his laughter, my first too, and continued racing after him out of the building and down the sidewalk. Of course I let him think he could outrun me, giving him the glee and the hope.
Hope is the second most important thing in the world.
Trust is the first.
When Sophia finally caught up with us, the bruise from her thrown whiskey bottle had almost faded from Cal’s chest. I was checking it for the last time, the pale tinge of yellow, and smiling, relieved. That’s when I heard the first door open. I recognized the particular click of our mother’s picklock at work. “It looks good,” I told him as he pulled his shirt down. “I’ve got a new Wolverine comic book I’ve been saving for you. It’s under my sleeping bag. Have fun.” While he dived for it, I went to meet Sophia.
I met her in the living room with her last full bottle of whiskey I’d brought with us when we packed. It was poetic justice. I liked poetry and I liked justice. I hefted the bottle. I didn’t say anything. What was there to say? I’d made a promise to myself. It was time to keep it.
Cal was my line, I’d told Junior. This was what happened when you crossed it.
I swung the bottle and broke her arm.
As she screamed, I did regret one thing. .
That I hadn’t done it sooner.
17
Cal
Present Day
“We should’ve done this sooner.”
“I think waiting until you could use your hands was the better notion,” Niko commented. “Not that I didn’t enjoy unzipping you every time you needed the bathroom.”
“Did you enjoy it?” Robin had his chin propped in his hand at the table.
“No,” Niko replied with a sigh that he made far grimmer than it had to be. “I would’ve paid you a hundred dollars a day to do it if I’d thought Cal wouldn’t have sooner pissed his pants at the thought.”
“You’ve seen Goodfellow naked. Hell, we both have.” Accidentally or catastrophically, both adjectives applied to that occasion. “I don’t want him or the Godzilla that doubles as his dick mocking Cal Junior and he would, the bastard.” The Ninth Circle was closed, empty. . of patrons and peris. I was behind the bar, pulling two bottles o
f wine and one of Scotch. The Scotch was for me and the wine for Goodfellow and Nik. Normally Nik didn’t drink. This was not a situation anyone could define as normal. I tossed him a corkscrew. “I don’t think we need glasses. Buckets maybe, but glasses are too small for what I have in mind.”
I turned the chair, straddled it, and sat with them at the table in the far corner. It had been three weeks, but it was always a night where “back to the wall” was an adult monster-killer’s security blanket. I opened the Scotch with only some awkwardness with my healing hands and took a swallow. It wasn’t the cheapest Scotch in the place but it wasn’t the best either and I didn’t bother to savor the taste. It would be good on stubborn household stains though.
Taking a look at Robin’s shirt, a radical departure from his Italian suits that cost more than the gold toilets in the Vatican, I groaned at the eye-searing colors and slick polyester blend. “Disco is dead. If it hadn’t died before I was born I would’ve killed it myself. Burn the damn shirt.”
“This is vintage, I’ll have you know,” the puck said, the wounded pride evident in the way he ran his hand down the front of an era that rivaled the Dark Ages for inventive tortures: visual and auditory. “I have a friend in Miami, Saul. He sends me only the best. I save them for special occasions.”
“This is a special occasion?” Niko inquired, appearing more relaxed than he had since Jack had shown up.
“I thought Ishiah and the others cleared out to give us a night to finally decompress and, I don’t know, not rip them a new one for being lying dicks every day since we’ve known them?” I took another swallow.
Robin spread his arms wide, the wine bottle swinging in punctuation. “Angels. Please. It was a white lie. Barely a lie. If you both weren’t so naive you would’ve immediately caught on and it wouldn’t have counted as a lie. Basically you have no one to blame but yourselves.”
“It was for our own good,” I snarked in an echo of my brother, not happy with it yet, but then again I did love my grudges and putting Nik in his place as it happened usually only once a decade.
“Yes, we’ve both been hearing that quite a bit lately,” Niko said wryly. “Let it go, Cal.” He was looking down his nose at the wine he’d just tasted. I’d tried to pick something expensive, but when your palate is accustomed to grass clippings and soy husks there isn’t much a person can do. “We know why they lied. Why Robin did as well. They had their reasons. We have issues.”
I snorted at that and drank again. Issues. That was a word for it, but not the right one by a long shot. Our issues should’ve come with radioactive warning labels, sealed in hazardous waste drums, and tossed into the Mariana Trench or Mount Doom if anyone had the upper body strength to carry them that far.
“Yes, they had their reasons. I had my reasons. We were trying to protect two babes in the woods. We were watching out the best we could for our friends.” Goodfellow drank half his bottle in one long swallow. It was an impressive and kind of filthy skill if you thought about it. I didn’t want to think about it.
“And, yes, Cal, this is a special occasion. To friends. Value them.” He lifted his bottle. He had an oddly indecipherable glint in the mossy green of his gaze. His bottle was held stiffly as if the toast was almost ceremonial. “They go and they come.”
Nik’s fingers clenched around his bottle as his face went blank. He echoed slowly, “They go and they come. That’s what you said before. I remember you. You were at our house. You were the man with the flat tire.” As he said it, I remembered it too, in a barely there haze, but I remembered Goodfellow. . no, Goodman he’d called himself, standing on our porch and no doubt looking absolutely identical to how he looked now. My memory wasn’t clear enough to see it, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know it.
“Yes, the first time we met-this time around. I’d always thought of myself as unforgettable but six years later you show up at my car lot, which was your idea by the way, Niko-I opened one at your suggestion, and neither of you remembered. But considering what happened after that with Jack’s apprentice, I cannot say I’m surprised that you did everything you could to forget that entire year altogether. Now, toast for the love of Priapus’s ever-upright phallus. This is the first time I’ve been able to tell you, in all your lives, without being beat over the head with a club or the jawbone of an ass or a wine amphorae for blasphemy against the gods. Leave it to Niko to be a Buddhist before Buddha himself. To be that for all his lives and not know it.”
Not life. Lives.
Numbly I clinked my bottle against theirs and watched Niko go from shaken to intrigued, then rueful in less than a second flat. “And I the Buddhist-in this life at least-never caught on.”
My brother believed in life after death, many lives. I believed in nothing. It looked like I might be wrong.
“What the hell are you saying? You knew us? You’ve always known us? That we were your friends, comrades in arms, buddies, whatever, reincarnated over and over throughout history? That we knew you and hung out with you on purpose God knows how many times? Reincarnation I’ll buy. Maybe. But choosing to spend all of history listening to your egomaniacal ass sounds more like Hell to me.” I grinned at Robin because at the moment he appeared as if he could really use it. After the angels, telling us another truth was bound to be nerve-wracking. He couldn’t know how we’d take it.
On the whole, I thought we were damn lucky.
Life after life? I had no religious beliefs or philosophies, but if Niko wanted to drag me behind him through reincarnation after reincarnation, I did owe him, didn’t I? In this life and most likely every other one.
“Yes, because you’ve been such a delightful companion throughout the ages. Of the six hundred and seventy-eight times I’ve nearly been killed, six hundred at minimum have been your fault.” He turned to Niko to say one word, one name actually, “Achilles.”
Niko, the alcohol shall not profane my holy temple having gone out the window with Boris and now this, Niko, took another quick swallow before saying with disbelief, “Last month, when my father was here”-late father, for which I happily took full credit-“and you told him that you were there when Achilles cut his hair to mourn his cousin Patroclus, you were actually saying I was Achilles?”
“Simply because of how I, and even Cal, whose entire knowledge of history could be collected in a comic book, compare you to Achilles on a monthly basis? Oh, and the legend in your clan that your blond hair and exceptional genetic tendency toward lethality in a fight comes from a descendant of Achilles playing hide the loukaniko with a winsome Rom maiden when your clan was in Greece a few centuries ago?” Robin snapped, rubbing his forehead with the heel of his free hand. “Zeus’s golden shower, you’re as thick as your brother. Of course you were Achilles.”
“And I’m guessing I was the dead guy, Patroclus,” I muttered. “Great. Just my luck.” I had a feeling that history did love to repeat itself. But at the same time. . once I’d been human. Not Auphe, not monster. I’d been human. That was worth knowing.
“Live by the sword, die by the sword. That little Jewish fellow with the big feet knew what he was talking about there. The two of you were mortal and warriors-always. Soldiers, mercenaries, fighters of all stripe, with nothing save a vulnerable human body to keep you alive. The combination makes for short life spans.” This time he finished the bottle rather than face us. “And shorter friendships.”
He peered at the empty bottle and sighed, bereft and despairing. That meant he was too lazy to get a replacement. I groaned and fetched one for him. “How’d you even figure this out? We looked different, right? We probably weren’t always brothers, were we?” A feeling of loss, icy and sharp, spiked in me at that thought.
“Strangely enough, you are brothers most often. Sometimes cousins. Occasionally, as I told you when you were younger, friends bonded by blood and battle. As for me noticing, it started when I kept crossing paths centuries apart with a string of humans of foul and sarcastic attitude. These were the days whe
n there was little law, rare enforcement, and a smart-ass mouth was reason enough for someone to be beaten to death, anyone would agree. That I kept running into this same nonsurvival-prone personality type began to make me somewhat suspicious. Nature should’ve weeded this strain out hundreds of years after I first encountered it for the sake of the species.”
That was harsh. I didn’t think my personality was species dooming. Not necessarily.
“That this annoying persona was invariably accompanied by another saner character who kept him from being beaten to death as he deserved, I began to think I’d gone insane. Older pucks do once you’ve lived a million or so years. Then after sharing a meal and a conversation with Buddha, the thin Indian version, that conversation we had about sex-enlightenment is very overrated-I think I’ve mentioned this story before. Ah, yes, by the constipated look on Cal’s face I have told this one. Irregardless we discussed other things as well and I knew. I was cursed”-he coughed-“ah. . blessed with eternal companions to fill the long years of an eternal life. One way or the other fate draws us together time and time again.”
When we’d first met him, or when I’d thought we’d first met him, at the car lot, Robin had seemed the most unwillingly solitary person or creature I’d known. Sex partners he had in plenty-he’d made certain we knew that in the first five minutes, but with the majority of the paien hating pucks and pucks absolutely despising each other, friends were definitely a seller’s market. He’d seized on us like a life preserver. For a moment I wondered how he could’ve been lonely if we’d been there all along and then I knew. We’d been mortal and he was not. We were seemingly eternal but present for a handful of years at a time. How many times had he seen Niko and me fall to that sword? How many times had he seen us die? How long were the stretches when we weren’t around? Tens of years, hundreds, thousands? Was he lonely or was it truer to say he was abandoned?