Brotherly Love

by Pete Dexter

  The first drops of blood are at the top of the stairs, next to his broom.

  He got up to meet them.

  “So what do you think?” the cop says. “Kids?”

  “He kept his stuff hidden up here,” Nick says. “I don’t know.”

  He steps over the blood and goes farther into the room. Nothing is out of place. Nick squats at the mat on the floor and puts his fingers into a tear in the material along the side, looking for the things he hid. The smell of the old man is in his bed and in the blanket bunched at the foot. Not a bad smell—the old man kept himself clean—just familiar.

  Nick pulls his fingers out of the mat and there is a hundred-dollar bill pinched between them. It is folded neatly in quarters and pressed as if by an iron. He hands it to the cop.

  “Jesus knows what he’s got up here,” he says.

  The cop looks around the room. “How long’s he been staying with you?” he says.

  “I don’t know, a few months.”

  The cop nods, looking at the mat now where the old man slept. He has known Nick a long time. “You leave the heat on for him?” he says.

  “It’s cold,” Nick says. “What the fuck am I going to do?”

  He goes back down the stairs, passing the crime scene investigators on the way up. He stops at the bottom, looking out at the neighbors who have accumulated outside the police ropes. He hears the cop named Fowler upstairs.

  “Don’t tear nothing up,” he says. “I want it just like it was when you leave.”

  Nick walks up to the diner, not wanting to hear them turning the place inside out. It doesn’t matter how they leave it.

  An old man walks in out of the cold, peeved, you can’t understand a word he says, and somehow you agree to that. And then one day you find him in a pile of unhuman angles at the bottom of the stairs, and you’ve got to agree to that too.

  Without wanting to, he thinks for a moment of the letter from Iowa, and then, without wanting to, of Phillip Flood.

  He pushes both those things out of his head, afraid where they will lead.

  He makes up his mind not to think of them again.

  In the afternoon, he meets Harry across the street from the school. He looks small next to some of the other boys, as if the books he’s carrying in a strap over his shoulder are as heavy as he is.

  Harry sees him right away—he seems to sense him there—and they walk home. The boy understands something has happened, he waits for his father to tell him what. He would protect him if he could.

  They walk without speaking half a block and then, still in sight of the children emptying out of school, Nick puts his arm around his son’s head and pulls him into his side. Holding him, holding on to him.

  And his son allows himself to be held, in front of his school friends, knowing his father wouldn’t do this to him without a good reason.

  Peter Flood walks in the door of the house where he has lived all his life, but is now, after nineteen years, somehow an uneasy guest.

  The laces on his hard-toed work boots are loose and slap lightly against the floor. He stops and takes them off, using the inside edge of the opposite boot to pry one loose, and then the bared sock to get the other. His legs are weak from negotiating a roof all day, and he feels them shake as he pulls out his feet.

  There is a letter for him on the table next to the stairwell. He stares at it a moment, and then he looks in the direction of the kitchen, knowing his aunt has opened the envelope and resealed it, wondering if she has heard him come in.

  He is late every night now; it is dusk before he quits work. She waits in the kitchen for him and complains about his cold, ruined dinner as if she had to eat it herself.

  He thinks sometimes of taking an apartment in another part of the city—the job pays full union scale, he could afford it—but he is tied to the house and the small yard, to the park across the street, to the room where he has waited—it seems like all his life—and received the news of events that have marked his life; the references for everything else.

  He is protected here by what has gone before, by an intimacy with the rooms. In that intimacy, there are moments when the people he has loved are close by.

  He knows he cannot stay here much longer—the house is more his uncle’s and even his cousin’s now than his—but he also knows this is the only place such an intimacy can exist.

  The things that have occurred here have bled into him and cannot be separated out for someone else to see.

  Still, there is less intimacy all the time. Michael intrudes into it; he is in every corner. He has begun to think of himself now in a different way. He has come to believe that whatever is not claimed is his.

  The house, Peter himself.

  It is part of what he is learning from his father.

  The smell of scorched sugar hangs in the air—a half-eaten angel food cake sits on the table, next to a single clean plate. His uncle is out on business, Michael is probably with him. He goes with him everywhere now. Aunt Theresa is in the kitchen watching television.

  The letter is from a lawyer.

  He climbs the staircase quietly, opening the envelope. The sounds from the television fill the house. His fingers are dirty and he smudges the lawyer’s address in the corner.

  Cape May, New Jersey.

  He walks into his room, shuts the door, and sits heavily on the bed. He pulls the letter out carefully, noticing the weight of the paper.

  Dear Mr. Flood:

  Kindly contact this office at your earliest convenience in regards to probate of the estate of your mother, Catherine Estelle Flood. Yours Sincerely,

  Everett Jordan, Esq.

  He thinks of her then, lying in bed in her room. He remembers the feel of the clothes in her closet.

  He checks the postmark again. Cape May, New Jersey. All this time only a hundred miles away; it makes him smile. He has imagined her living in California.

  He refolds the letter and slides it back in the envelope, and then puts the envelope in his shirt pocket. He puts his feet into his tennis shoes and goes back down the stairs and out the door quietly, not wanting to fight the battle of ruined dinners now.

  He closes the door and wanders into the park across the street. A tire hangs from a rope in the dark—a homemade swing—and beyond it, in the light from a streetlamp, a small black dog worries his way along the curb, his nose to the cement, as if there were not time enough to smell it all.

  Peter fits his hips into the tire and feels the branch holding it bend under his weight. He looks up into the tree, remembering small things about his mother, coming finally to the afternoon she stood in the door and saw the bundle in Victor Kopec’s arms.

  And the moment she understood what it was. Nothing after that counted.

  And with that taste in his mouth, he looks across the park and sees a light in Nick DiMaggio’s living room window.

  He wonders if Nick would remember him after so much time. It is only a thought, but a moment later he pulls himself through the tire and starts out across the park.

  And then he is standing outside Nick’s house. No idea what he intends to do, he is just there.

  He does not touch the door knock—he has not thought of touching it—but in a moment the porch light comes on, and then the door opens and Nick steps out, wearing his reading glasses and a T-shirt. He takes the glasses off, studying him. He begins to smile.

  “Peter?” he says. “How you doin’?”

  The first time Nick has ever remembered his name.

  He closes the few feet to the door, not feeling his legs. “Come on in,” Nick says. “You eat yet?”

  Peter walks in the house with Nick’s hand on his shoulder. The place is warm and smells good. Nick goes to the bottom of the stairs and calls up. “Harry,” he says, “come down and see who’s here.”

  Nick’s wife sticks her head around the corner from the kitchen. She smiles at Peter without knowing who he is—disappointed, he thinks—then disappears.

&nbs
p; Nick is looking at Peter, up and down, happy to see him. “You got big,” he says.

  Old weights shift, and Peter Flood walks farther into the room, needing to move, suddenly afraid he is going to bawl.

  Harry comes down the stairs then, and he has gotten big too. He stops at the bottom, looking at Peter as if he doesn’t know who he is.

  “It’s Peter Flood,” Nick says. “You remember, he used to come up to the gym.”

  Harry nods, the elements of a smile on his face, but there is no smile there. “How you doin’?” he says. He looks quickly at his father.

  “So you been lifting weights or what?” Nick says, touching his arm.

  Peter shakes his head. “I got a job,” he says.

  Which is true, but not completely true. His uncle got him the job—got them both jobs. He thinks of the foreman of the crew nodding as the supervisor told him he had to use them, looking at the ground. He wouldn’t look at either one of them.

  “What are we supposed to do?” Michael said when the supervisor was gone.

  The foreman looked back toward the job, as if they weren’t there. “It don’t matter to me, as long as you stay out of the way,” he said.

  Michael found some shade and sat down, and Peter followed the foreman around the construction site all morning until he finally gave him something to carry.

  He hauled shingles and nails up the ladders at first, then learned the job itself, squatting all afternoon on roofs thirty and forty feet in the air, the glare of the sun all around him. Surrounded by the noise and movement of the city, but isolated from it too.

  He liked it on the roofs, and pushed himself toward exhaustion, and the relief that came on the other side.

  Michael quit the job after the first summer and went into the business end of the business. His father was president of the Trade Union Council then; the other unions had seen that he’d cut the guys who ran things in the city—the young Italians who took over after Constantine—out of the roofers’ business, and wanted them out of their business, too.

  “Lookit this arm,” Nick says to Harry. Harry looks at Peter’s arm, going along with his father.

  Nick sits down on the couch and offers Peter the seat next to him. Harry is still standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  “So, what you been doing?” Nick says.

  Peter tries to think. “Just working,” he says.

  “You ain’t in school …”

  He shakes his head. Not for a long time now.

  “You ought to come by the gym sometime,” Nick says.

  Harry looks at his father again, half a second; he bites his lip. Nick’s wife puts her head around the corner one more time to see if Peter is still there. Her table is set, and Peter knows from the sounds coming out of the kitchen that she’s ready to serve dinner.

  “He going to stay, Nick?” she says.

  Peter shakes his head no and begins to get up. Realizing that he is still in the shirt and pants and socks he wore to work.

  “Stick around,” Nick says. “She can cook a little.”

  “I got stuff to do,” he says, back on his feet now, wondering what he will say if Nick asks him what stuff that is.

  But Nick lets him go. “You ought to come by the gym, move around a little,” he says again, walking him to the door.

  Harry stares at him as he goes past on the way out, and then nods, barely. Nick shakes his hand.

  The door closes and Peter walks into the park. He feels the letter, stiff against his shirt. He takes it out and reads it again in the light from the streetlamp, and then folds it into thirds and puts it carefully into his wallet.

  He carries the letter with him the rest of the week, it and the visit to Nick DiMaggio’s living room.

  He remembers the words Nick said exactly, the dents in the bridge of his nose from his glasses, the slippers half under the couch, the expression on his wife’s face. He thinks of these things in an order that is not quite as he saw them, and settles finally on Harry, standing at the foot of the stairs, dreading to have him there.

  He understands that look without knowing the reason for it, and he will not go back to the house.

  He thinks of the gym though, all that week as he works his way across the steeply pitched roofs of a development of low-income town houses going up just off Shunk Street deep in South Philadelphia.

  A whole block of crumbling row houses was bought and demolished to make room for the development, and for weeks, the neighbors laid themselves in front of the bulldozers to keep them away. But in the end, the federal government waited the neighbors out, and built its town houses for the blacks.

  Once in a while, he glimpses an old woman or an old man behind the barriers that the police have erected, staring at him as he climbs up or down—some of them come in the morning with folding chairs to watch the despised buildings going up—and they dread to have him there too.

  But he cannot spend his life on roofs.

  He cannot stay where he is comfortable forever.

  Peter walks into the gym on a Saturday afternoon. Harry is there alone, shirtless, doing sit-ups on an elevated board in the corner.

  He looks around the place—it is messier now than he remembers it, but then the old man who liked to clean is gone—thinking of his uncle’s admonition never to come here again. His uncle doesn’t know where he goes anymore, though, and doesn’t ask. He watches Michael himself now.

  “How you doing?” he says to Harry.

  The kid nods, his fingers laced behind his neck, touching each knee with the opposite elbow and then dropping halfway to the floor and bringing himself up again. The muscles in his stomach appear and disappear under the skin.

  Peter studies the walls, the yellowed pictures of old fighters undisturbed since the last time he was here. He remembers that last time, leaving Nick at the top of the stairs and following Michael down, headed for a blow job at Bandstand.

  The show is still on the air, but it’s called American Bandstand now, and Larry Tock is long gone. Dead somewhere in Texas.

  Harry does a final sit-up and stops, sitting uphill, looking at Peter.

  “Your dad around?” Peter says.

  Harry stands up, almost as tall as Peter but thinner. “He’s supposed to be back already,” he says. He checks the clock. “I could give you a few rounds, if you want.”

  The kid breaks his nose five seconds after they touch gloves.

  The bell rings, they come together in the middle of the ring, and he breaks his nose with an uppercut.

  Peter hears the sound distinctly, the break and then a ringing, and then he hears his breath leaving his chest as Harry hits him just below his rib cage on the right side.

  He covers himself up, stumbling backward into a corner, feeling Nick’s kid coming after him more than seeing him. He takes a hook to the head, and then a right hand hits him in the shoulder and knocks him off balance, and then he is hit again below the ribs.

  He grabs Harry in the corner, holding on until he can breathe again. Harry jerks back, trying to get loose, twice as strong as he looks, but Peter holds him until the stab of pain in his chest—the thing that took his breath—narrows and shortens, and then he pushes him away, back into the middle of the ring.

  Harry is on top of him again before he can leave the corner. He pounds his shoulders and arms as Peter covers up, hits him twenty times before Peter catches one of his gloves and pulls him in and holds him again. He hears his own breathing against Harry’s shoulder, and then the shoulder moves, bouncing into his face, and the kid’s hands are loose and Peter is trying to protect himself from punches he cannot see or predict.

  He is strangely fascinated by the punches, their speed and ferocity. Even as the numbness settles into his shoulders and arms, the kid’s intention settles too. He is trying to hurt him.

  He catches one of the gloves again and pulls Harry close, and at the same time the buzzer goes off. Peter feels him relax.

  Harry turns away and begins wal
king in quick circles around the ring, his sweat and Peter’s blood smeared across the muscles in his stomach. Peter stands where he is, taking as much air as he can into his chest, wiping at his nose with the sleeve of his shirt.

  He has not caught his breath when the buzzer goes off again. Harry turns back to him, looking at him for the first time since the end of the round, and offers one of his gloves for Peter to touch.

  A moment later, he hits him again in the nose. Peter is aware of the pain now; it has a rhythm that is almost unconnected to the punches themselves, a hum someplace behind the violence.

  A weight tugs him, one way and then another, and Peter fights for balance, using the ropes behind him and then Harry himself when he can catch an arm or his head. He does that, collects himself, and then pushes him away.

  The kid relaxes when he is caught and is pushed away, and it is like lifting dead weight, over and over.

  Somewhere in the second round, Peter feels fatigue in his arms; he feels the limits of his strength.

  He still pushes Harry away—but not as far away now—and he is back a second later, right in front of him, bobbing like a fishing cork, impossible to hit or stop. The punches land once and then seem to echo back a moment later, even as other punches are coming in other places.

  The buzzer goes off and Harry stares at Peter a long moment, as if he does not want to stop.

  Peter wipes at the blood from his nose and waits for the next round.

  A minute into that round, Peter has trapped Harry’s arm just behind the elbow and is holding on—all pretense of boxing gone, he only wants to last the round—and as he looks past Harry’s shoulder he sees Nick standing in the corner, his arms draped across the ropes.

  Nick is smiling, but he isn’t happy. He sees what is happening in the ring.

  Peter straightens himself up, not wanting to look so sloppy in front of Nick, and throws a surprise right hand that bounces off the top of Harry’s head. In return, Harry hits him with half a dozen shots before he can grab his arms again, and stall for a little more time.