And me? I always took Africa, the birthplace of civilization, my civilization. From there I could strike out at South America, Europe, or Asia. South America was always unclaimed territory and therefore an easy conquest and usually my first target. Then came North America. Boy, did that make Mary mad.
“Why do you always attack me first?” She would predictably fume when I threw her pieces into the box as I easily overran her. “You jerk. Let me arrange them neatly. I want my dignity in defeat.”
I never quite understood her point. But her response was always so predictable. She would quietly get Sam’s attention and nod to him to meet her in the living room. There they would conspire against me while I made rude gestures that kept Harry and Kate in stitches. When they returned, Sam would announce to the world that the time had come for his hordes to sweep the world clean of evil and his march across Asia would begin. Things would always seem desperate for me as Sam’s forces pounded their way into Africa and took my home continent, bringing Mary’s triumphantly wagging tongue into my face. Once he even got as far as North America before running out of men. But his defeat was inevitable. You see, I had attrition and numbers on my side. He had to leave at least one marker in each conquered country, and all I had to do was bump off a few along the way until he ran out of men. You’d think he’d never had a day of math. I mean, I slept through most of math, and even I could count how many men I had and just how many countries I would need to take to wipe someone out. Plus, I had my secret weapon — I always held back a matched set of Risk cards until the right moment when I would play them and recover a zillion men to thoroughly erase Sam and his minions. Every year it was the same. You’d think they’d remember. They didn’t.
That invariably left Harry and me, and I owned the entire world except for Australia. But usually by then everyone was tired and we called it a night without a resolution except to say that I won. I always won — just ask me. Or at least I would have won had we fought it out. Except that one time I actually did attack him. I forget why — he probably pissed me off, or more likely Sam and Mary pissed me off. For some odd reason, I was losing way more guys than him and I knew he was going to beat me. I had him three or four to one and still he held fast to his Australian hideout. That was the one time in a Risk game that I used Plan B. Plan B was my fallback plan in any game where I knew the outcome would be my defeat. It involved a clever, fully deniable tipping over of the board so that no one could ever get it back together again. Thus, I could not lose. I didn’t win, but at least I didn’t lose. I was always so good at games.
What a stupid game, but it was a family tradition that none of us dared break. It was the glue that held us together each Christmas night; this Christmas night too. After Mom went upstairs to be with Dad, Sam brought out the Risk game and we mechanically set it up. Kate set a place for Harry. Well, it was an empty chair, but we all knew it was for Harry. Talk about morbid… She arranged his cards neatly and, after passing a knowing look around the table like the one who is holding the Old Maid but wants you to think she isn’t, set his blue men up in Australia. When the board was arranged with all of our forces we sat and stared at it for an eternity. I took the dice, pulled my first three red pieces from my clear plastic tray, and fingered them thoughtfully. It was the first time I can remember that none of the others claimed the right to go first. Still the king after all these years… I decided to pounce on Madagascar and work my way north.
"I don't understand why Harry always wanted Australia," Kate whispered. "What's so special about Australia?"
“He didn’t like to fight so he picked the one place no one wanted to be in. He wasn’t exactly a brilliant tactician, you know.” That was easy.
Sam challenged me with a glare. "It only has one way in and one way out. It has a tactical defensive advantage. And there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“And I guess you would know, being the five star general that you are. Remind me again when the last time you won this game was?”
“The last time you didn’t cheat.”
“Sounds like sour grapes to me there bucky.” I always enjoyed a good argument.
Good old Mary, though — she should have been a bomb technician. She really knew how to diffuse a family disagreement with inanity. Maybe she was smarter than I gave her credit for.
"There are too many poisonous snakes in Australia," she shook her head in a way that actually made me think she was being thoughtful. "I could never live in a place like that. I'd much rather be in the United States. Far more civilized…"
"It's just a game, stupid," I said without thinking. I usually led with my mouth — not always the best plan, but it was one I generally employed. I made a note to think about alternatives in the future.
I guess my expression was one of apology after that for Mary just smiled and said, "It's okay, Tommy."
Why was I always so quick to be nasty? Was it all those years of training as a child terrorist? Or maybe it was something I’d picked up from the Finnerty boys. They had been my gang idols when I was ten. I wondered if they could surgically install a zipper on my mouth and then almost immediately wondered why in the world I had wondered such a stupid idea.
“But it was always the same. Why did it always have to be the same?” Kate was crying. “Why can’t it be the same again?”
And that was a typical Kate-ism — a mashing together of several thoughts into a compound utterance that left you sorting through pronouns and doing mental fill-in-the-blanks to insert all the missing words and phrases just to make her statement actually make sense. I was usually pretty good at it, but my mind was tired so I gave up and took her hand and patted it — something I remembered seeing old Grandma Ryan do when she was trying to console Kate after I had done something particularly mean to her.
But I had no clue what to say, since I never understood much of what Grandma Ryan ever said in her thick, Irish brogue. When she lectured me I just usually grinned at her and nodded, hoping she would give up and go away, that I would not get to hear her famous words, “Woipe dat smoile offn yer foice, Tommy me boyo,” before she smacked me. That was an Irish dialect that even I understood. But what do you say when your family’s life has been torn apart and a piece of it thrown in the trash? I considered a Plan B but tossed that idea aside summarily.
Sam squirmed in his chair. "Did they say what happened, Tom?"
I just shook my head.
"Well, who was it that called?"
"I don't know, Sam. It wasn’t me on the phone, remember?” I always enjoyed making Sam feel stupid. “I can only tell you what Dad told me."
Mary began to cry, too. "It's not fair. Harry would never do anything to hurt anyone. He doesn’t deserve to die. It’s just not fair.” Mary was always so air-headedly mathematical in her assessment of things. To her, everything could be put on a scale and weighed to determine right or wrong, better or worse, stylish or dorky. She had a lot to learn about things. I made a note to give her a lesson in life someday when I had nothing better to do. ”I don't want Harry to be dead, even if he didn’t like us anymore.”
Kate stopped crying long enough to scream at her, “He liked us. He loved us!”
“He sure didn’t act like it.”
Mary was right, but this was going nowhere and I wanted to be somewhere else. It was giving me a headache. “If you ask me, he dumped us,” I said.
The dice would push this morbid discussion along. There was an inevitability and momentum in every turn-based game that served to keep people moving along during even the dullest of conversations. That’s why people played games — not to win, not to do something inherently interesting or wonderful, but to pass the time without getting stuck on any particular, depressing moment in their lives. That was my theory in designing them, and that’s why I was successful. I could design a game whose objective was to trim fifty nose hairs without cutting yourself and make it a winner. Wild Bill Striker, my sophomore high school history and health teacher and
basketball coach, knew all about that. And yes, I was able to continue playing basketball after grade school — Nicky Amendola mysteriously never made it to my high school — something about his grades being too low. One day Wild Bill spent an hour showing us the proper way to trim nose hairs. The demonstration was given during our final exam in history — while we took his test, he trimmed his nose hairs.
I rolled three sixes and impatiently motioned to Mary, who currently owned Madagascar. Not for long…
Sam’s face was red and he blurted out something that I would have pounded him for when we were younger, but he was bigger than me now. “Shut up, Tom. He didn’t dump us. It’s just something he’s going through.”
Before I could launch my return salvo, Kate whispered, staring at the Risk board, “He shouldn’t have died. If anyone should have died it's..." She looked up. Her voice trailed off as our eyes met.
"Me? It should have been me?" I was, after all, voted by my high school class the most likely to be dead by twenty. And I was certainly the most paranoid of the Ryans. And I suppose they all had reasons to want me dead. I had a few myself actually.
"I didn't mean that, Tommy. I meant old people. Old people. He was just a kid.”
Sam was positively furious. “But Mom and Dad are old. I don't want them to die, do you? I don't want anyone to die."
Stupid Sam. Everyone dies, but it did seem like Harry had been cheated out of his life. And it was a major bummer that we all had to die someday. Did it make a difference when? I know I didn’t want to die, but did it really make any difference? Fortunately, scary thoughts like that never lasted more than momentarily for me, and this one was long gone and forgotten when I changed the subject. "Do you guys remember when we set up that war in the side yard? D-Day. Remember?"
Sam remembered. "The one with all the ships and the model planes and the armies on the beaches in the woods? You got in so much trouble for lighting that Flying Tiger on fire and crashing it into your battleship. That was classic." He laughed. Sam always laughed when I got in trouble.
Oh well, I guess after all those years of domination by King Tom he deserved a laugh once in a while. I made a note to get him back for that later. "Harry and I were the allies attacking the beaches, and Mary and Kate were the Germans. And setting that plane on fire was Harry’s idea, not mine."
“But it was you that covered it all with glue so it would explode into flames. And as I recall it was Harry who had no hair on his right hand for a month after that.”
And all this time I had thought I’d successfully laid the blame on Harry for that one. “Yeah, well…”
"I didn't want to be the Germans. I wanted to be the French. I just love French bread and I absolutely loathe sauerkraut." We all laughed at Mary’s feigned pouting. It felt good to laugh. Why do people laugh when something has gone wrong? Is it because there isn’t much else to do but cry?
"Someone has to be the bad guys. How can you have good guys without bad guys?" One of my more cosmic statements. I fingered my little red men sitting idly in East Africa, an amorphous section of the Risk continent that doesn't show on any real map. I wondered if perhaps the Risk map were drawn long ago when the political makeup of Africa was different. I really should have listened to Miss Melluci during geography class in fifth grade instead of staring at Bonnie Shoedel.
"Harry was always a good guy," Kate said softly. “It never made sense for him to be anyone else.”
Harry was no saint. That I knew. But for once, I stifled my comeback. What was the point?
"He sure was," Sam nodded. "I wish he hadn't left home like that. Four years is a long time."
Kate’s look turned quizzical. That always spelled trouble. "Tom?"
"Yeah?" I smiled. Kate was such a sweet person. She was growing up into quite a pretty girl too, so seemingly naïve yet so insightful. Her long reddish hair gave her an air of devilishness that her innocent manner belied. Kelly Erickson was a lot like her. I guess that’s why Kelly and I had hit it off so well. Too bad I was such a hardcore jerk. We might still be together. Oh well.
"If there has to be a bad guy to have good guys, who is the bad guy who killed Harry?"
“Huh?” It took me a second to follow her line of thought, but she was drawing a conclusion from my statements about good and bad guys. Thinking that the things I said always made sense was a big mistake, but I didn’t let on. It was too important a tactic for me to give up. Confusion enhances the fog of war and that gives me the strategic advantage. You would expect no less of a king. "They said it was an accident, Kate."
"Harry didn't have accidents," Sam cut in. "He said himself there are no accidents, only people who cause things that we call accidents."
"That's stupid, Sam. Everyone has accidents."
"Are you saying Harry was stupid?" Sam rose from his chair. I could see I'd ticked him off. Over the years he had grown much bigger than me and beyond my ability to physically dominate or intimidate him. He could have picked me up and thrown me across the room if he wanted to, but I'd never let him know that. I’d have to fight dirty if he came at me. That was my only hope. I’d kick him in the nuts. I decided not to get up — that would be a response to his challenge. I’d play it cool for the time being.
"No, all I'm saying is that I think he was wrong. There are accidents. Shit happens. Like that time Kenny Alpern and Ben Philips beat up Harry down by the streetcar stop. It was dark and they thought he was me. That was an accident, a case of mistaken identity. After all, lots of people who don’t know us get us mixed up, ever since high school." Actually, the nuns at Saint Catherine’s thought I was Harry’s evil twin, but it didn’t seem right to mention that just then. We did look pretty much alike. Change the haircut a little, lose a little weight, and we could easily be twins to the unknowing.
Sam sat down again. “They’ll never get us confused, I can tell you that.”
My fists relaxed. The imminent threat had passed. But that did not stop me from taunting him. “Guess not, Beanpole.” Sam was probably six foot three. I was five ten, well five ten and a half if I stood up straight.
“Midget.”
“Dork.”
“Look, Tom, everyone knows you egged those two on and then dared them to meet you at the streetcar stop that night. And Harry told me you’d asked him to take your paper route that evening ‘cause you weren’t feeling well. You knew they would be there. You set him up.”
“Prove it.” How did he know that? I thought I had been particularly clever about that one. “Those were lies spread by my enemies.”
“How about I flatten your face?”
Ouch, that would hurt. “Unlikely.”
“Stop it, you two!” Mary yelled.
Sam looked directly at Mary, his anger silencing her. That was new. I knew they had always been close — a bond developed from when it was them against me — but I hadn’t realized that Sam was the one in command. I had always thought it was just another failed power-sharing alliance. I would have to reevaluate my tactics with the change in fortunes of war.
The stiff tenseness in Sam’s jaw created by his anger was also something I’d never noticed before. I guess I had been away too long myself. His words focused his rage on me. “All I’m saying is that I agree with Harry. Things just don’t happen. Not important things. They happen for a reason. Someone or something causes them. And Harry has never had an accident when it came to something that mattered. Never.”
Kate traced the boundaries of Harry’s holdings on the Risk board with her finger. “That’s why he always played Australia. He avoided trouble. He avoided accidents and people who caused them. He wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t reckless.”
It was true. Harry did have a way of staying out of the line of fire, of laying low. I wondered momentarily myself how he could have had such a drastic accident. But in the spirit of never admitting I was wrong I went back to my argument that accidents happen. “What about when he was run over by that car?” I had to vindicate myself
somehow.
“He was only five.” Mary’s glance was withering. For one weaker than me, it would have been devastating. “And you shouldn’t have lent him your wagon.”
My palms were moist. I put my hands in my lap. Mary’s was, of course, a totally unfair assessment of what had happened when Harry stole my wagon and tried to ride it down Gaylord Avenue. He couldn’t control it when he hit the curb crossing the alley and was thrown into the street and under the wheel of a car. It was six months and three operations on his leg before he came home. I had seen him take my Radio Flyer and head for the sidewalk. I could have stopped him, but I knew he would crash and I wanted to teach him a lesson. I just didn’t think he would crash into a car. “That was an accident.”
“Caused by you.”
I felt myself being cornered, accused, on trial. This was not unusual for me, but for some reason I was happy playing the role of the child criminal, for now we had someone to take out our combined frustrations on, someone to vent on. I was a hero of sorts, actually. I was saving us all from breaking down and crying over the loss of Harry. That realization made it easier for me to continue. “Look, what do you want me to say?” I don’t believe in E.S.P. or predestination. Never have. But I knew what was coming. I welcomed it, because I believed it, too, despite my words. We all believed it now.
Four Years from Home Page 3