Brotherly Love

by Pete Dexter

  Michael looks up from the carpet and says, “Please tell me you ain’t asking me to make your mother a roofer.…”

  The call comes in then, over the private line. The councilman picks it up, flashing cuff links, and says, “Councilman Taylor speaking.…”

  He listens a moment, and then hands the phone to Michael, who cleans the receiver before he puts it against his ear. He does business with colored people—more and more, they are part of the flow of power—but he doesn’t want their germs.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  He listens, not saying a word, and then he hangs up. He looks at Peter. “Bobby the Jap,” he says. “How do you like that?”

  Benjamin Taylor smiles and rests his chin on his fingers. “Bad news, gentlemen?”

  Michael stares at him, perched on his white-tipped fingers, looking for some sign the spook is playing with him.

  Benjamin Taylor lets the smile on his face change, a natural-looking change, until there is nothing there but sympathy.

  Michael stands up, pushing himself away from the desk, and walks out without another word. Peter stays in the office a moment longer, getting used to the news, a stillness not unlike falling suddenly in his chest.

  And then he gets up too.

  The councilman watches him from behind the desk, looking uncomfortable. “Tell your brother I am sorry for his loss,” he says.

  “Cousin,” Peter says. “He’s my cousin.”

  Peter walks down four flights of stairs and finds Michael standing outside the north entrance. The limo is cutting across the three lanes of stalled traffic that encircle City Hall, day and night, sparkling in the sunlight. Horns honk, lights change, nothing moves.

  “They picked him up on the street, he gets right in the car with them,” Michael says. “He don’t try to run or anything.”

  He shakes his head while Peter pictures Bobby getting in the car. It seems to Peter that he had been resigned to something since he started to work for Michael.

  “Them people,” Michael says, “sometimes you think they want to die.”

  The limo pulls in front of a city bus and then climbs the curb to the sidewalk. It stops with its back end still blocking a lane of traffic and Monk gets out to open the door.

  Michael ducks in and slides across the seat. Peter crawls in behind him. The door shuts, and Michael’s voice comes to Peter out of the dark.

  “They took him out by the airport and popped him,” he says, “but that’s it. They didn’t do nothing to him.”

  Monk gets in behind the wheel. “We going to Maryland?” he says. There is a Thoroughbred racehorse in Maryland that Michael is supposed to look at that afternoon. He has been talking about buying a racehorse all spring.

  Peter begins to shake his head no.

  “Yeah,” Michael says, “Maryland.”

  Peter looks across the seat at his cousin, his eyes adjusting to the dark. Michael shrugs. “I still want my horse,” he says.

  Monk steers the car back into traffic and heads down Broad Street toward I-95, and then south on I-95 toward the airport. Peter stares out the window at the high weeds between the refineries and the runways. Somewhere in the weeds is a dirt road where Bobby was left in his plastic sack.

  “Bobby had kids, right?” Michael says.

  Peter nods. “Three of them.”

  The children lived with his ex-wife in a place called Davie, Florida. Sometimes Bobby would disappear for two, three weeks at a time to see them. He never said where he was going or when he was coming back. Once, when Peter told him he ought to let Michael know where he was so he wouldn’t get the wrong idea—Michael had begun to worry that anybody who wasn’t around had gone to work for the Italians—Bobby said, “Just tell him I’m on a load, Pally. He ain’t going to understand this anyway, the kid’s are all girls.”

  That’s where Peter had been thinking Bobby was the last few days, with his girls in Davie, Florida.

  “His wife, she divorce him or what?” Michael says.

  “Yeah, she left.”

  “We ought to take care of the kids for him,” he says after a while. “But nothin’ for her, Pally. Not a fuckin’ cent.”

  They cross into Delaware and pass through Wilmington. Peter notices Michael staring at a stand of trees off the next exit.

  “What I think,” Michael says quietly, “we got to respond to this a way it ain’t going to happen again.”

  Michael stands in front of the horse for three seconds, his feet spread, his arms folded in front of his chest. The horse is lying on her back, chewing straw. “Fuck this horse,” he says.

  He turns and walks out of the barn back toward the car.

  The man who is showing him the horse hurries to catch up. “Mr. Flood?” he says. “You want to look at her run or something?”

  Monk sees Michael coming and opens the back door.

  “Tell your boss, don’t waste my time,” Michael says.

  “That there’s a excellent horse,” the man says, “ain’t nothing wrong with her.”

  Michael gets into the car; Monk shuts the door and then steps in front of the man who is showing the horse.

  Peter is still in the barn, wanting to watch the horse a little longer, to see how she gets up. Wanting some time to think about Bobby. He calls the animal, making a kissing noise. She blows back, and dust rises from the straw in front of her teeth.

  The man showing the horse meets Peter on his way to the car. “That’s a excellent horse,” he says. “She’s sound. You can’t tell nothing just standing in front of her stall.”

  “She looks like an excellent horse,” Peter says, and he steps around the man and gets into the car too. Michael is staring through the dark-tinted rear window at a white, two-story house with columns across the front that sits perhaps a quarter mile away, separated from the barn by a pasture and three rail fences.

  “Can you believe this motherfucker tries to sell me a horse like that?” he says.

  Peter doesn’t answer.

  Michael stares at the mansion. “I told them I want a big horse,” he says. “That horse look big to you?”

  Peter says, “How can you tell, she’s lying down?”

  “You can tell,” he says.

  They are crossing the bridge over Chesapeake City before Michael speaks again.

  “Jimmy Measles tells me there was a colored guy up to the gym this week,” he says.

  Peter takes a slow, even breath, centering himself. After Michael lets you see him angry, he believes you owe him something until he sees you angry too.

  “A trainer brought a guy over,” Peter says.

  It is quiet in the car again, Michael watching him. “Jimmy says this guy kicked Harry’s ass.”

  Peter looks out the window at the canal that runs through the middle of the town. Two tugs are taking a tanker west, toward the Chesapeake Bay.

  “So?” Michael says, “did he or not?”

  “The colored kid was the kind of kid comes in to learn something,” he says. “He isn’t showing off, and Harry carries him a couple of rounds, lets him hit him a few punches.”

  “So he didn’t kick his ass?” Michael says. Peter sees him begin to smile. “Pally?”

  Peter says, “Michael, what do you care about the fuckin’ gym?”

  Michael stares at him as if he has been slapped, something furious bouncing around inside his head, into the walls, looking for a place to land.

  Then finally it settles. Michael smiles.

  And seeing that smile, Peter thinks of a Saturday morning his uncle made them wrestle. He was twice as strong as Michael, and held his wrists against the floor until his uncle got bored. An hour later Michael conked him with the hammer, forty stitches. Peter was asleep on the couch, the sports section open across his chest; Michael might have been twelve years old.

  He remembers the ride to the hospital, holding a towel against the top of his head. On the way home, his uncle suddenly stopped the car and bought them both bicycles, and M
ichael smiled the way he is smiling now.

  “Youse are brothers,” his uncle said.

  And one way or another, Peter has been afraid to go to sleep around his cousin ever since.

  “Hey, Pally, I was thinking,” Michael says later. “If Bobby the Jap’s half Irish, how come he looks all Japanese?”

  Peter shakes his head. He doesn’t want to talk to Michael about Bobby.

  Jimmy Measles’s wife is alone.

  Jimmy has gone to meet Michael at a club on Two Street, and Peter comes here, where he knows Michael will not be, and finds her sitting alone, under the stained glass.

  After an argument, he and Michael go different places. An unspoken rule.

  He sits down with her.

  As arguments go, it wasn’t much—only those few words in the back seat of the car—but words between Michael and Peter do not disappear. They settle and last.

  Jimmy Measles’s wife watches him stab at a wedge of lime floating in his glass.

  He looks at her, thinking of Jimmy telling Michael that some colored kid had kicked Harry’s ass, always looking for something that Michael will pat him on the head for … always putting himself places he doesn’t belong.

  There is noise in the corner, a couple of Pine Street antiques dealers arm wrestling and arguing over the rules. Peter looks in that direction; they must be seventy years old.

  “You’re looking for Jimmy, he’s gone somewhere with Michael,” she says.

  He looks at her. “Jimmy and his pals,” he says.

  “You’re his pal.” She is playing with him now.

  He shakes his head. “I’m his baby-sitter,” he says.

  “What for?”

  “For Michael could visit you across the street.”

  She motions the bartender, showing him her empty glass. Someone puts money into the jukebox, and when she speaks again she has to raise her voice over the song “Louie, Louie.” The kids from the art college will play “Louie, Louie” a hundred times in a row if you let them.

  “Jimmy says they shot him in the penis,” she says.

  Peter sips his drink.

  She says, “Was it painful?”

  “Yeah, I think that’s safe to say that.”

  They sit in the noise a minute, not trying to talk. She takes a drink, he traps the piece of lime against the side of the glass and spears it. A smile touches the corners of her lips. “Can he still function?” she says.

  The bartender rejects “Louie, Louie,” and there are boos from the corner.

  Peter shrugs. “He isn’t hooked up to a bag, if that’s what you mean.” In the absence of music, his voice carries the whole room.

  “That’s not what I mean,” she says.

  A little later she says, “You’re cousins,” teasing in some way he can’t quite find.

  He nods. “Michael’s father and my father were brothers.”

  “You don’t remind me of each other.”

  “Cousins aren’t supposed to be like each other, that’s brothers.”

  She seems to know where to touch him; he wonders what Michael told her.

  “Sometimes they are,” she says.

  He takes her across the street; she doesn’t say yes, she doesn’t say no, she just comes along. She unlocks the door, and that is as much help as she offers.

  There is a black leather couch against the far wall of the living room; he goes that direction and she follows. All the furniture is black leather, the walls are white. He sits down under a portrait of Jimmy that gives him snow-white teeth and big shoulders, and she stands in front of him, waiting.

  He reaches behind her and touches the back of her knee. She doesn’t move. He follows the line of her leg up under her skirt. She stands in front of him, watching. The back of her thigh curves under his hand, a defined, muscled curve, and her skirt rides up her legs in front and collects in back across his arm—a soft weight, it could be her hair. He wonders how he looks to her after her husband and Michael, if she is comparing them.

  And it is that thought—the way Jimmy Measles looks to her as he sits in this chair—that stops him: a slipper dangling off a skinny, hairless white leg; his legs crossed under a monogramed robe. Thinking of his dancing days.

  Peter’s hand is on her behind, just above the place her legs come together. She is wearing nothing under the skirt.

  He takes his hand off her, the hem of her skirt drops back to her knees. She stands still a moment longer, and if it makes any difference to her if his hand is under her skirt or not, it doesn’t show.

  He still feels the solid weight of her cheeks in his hand.

  She walks out of the room and a moment later he hears her open the back door, and then there are scrambling noises across a tile floor. Two Boston terriers come through the open door, yappy, wet-nosed little dogs that shake, faces that look as if they’re pressed into a window. He recognizes them from the pictures Jimmy keeps in his wallet.

  He wonders how this happened—that the famous Jimmy Measles put himself in Peter’s life, and put Peter in his.

  The dogs are smelling his shoes when Jimmy’s wife comes back into the room. “Pancho and Boner,” he says, pointing in a hesitant way to one and then the other.

  She shrugs, as if she cannot tell them apart.

  She sits down in a chair opposite the couch and crosses her legs. They watch the dogs smell his shoes. One of the animals jumps onto the couch next to him, pushing its nose under his hand, wanting to be touched. The other one is gray-faced and old, and can’t make it up. He sits on the floor and whines.

  Peter picks him up and puts them together.

  “He doesn’t smell good,” she says, meaning the one he helped up. “They get old like that, they get gamey.”

  There is a small pinch of skin at the back of the old dog’s neck, the rest of him is as tight as a wiener. Peter rubs the skin and the dog’s back leg begins to kick, a scratching motion. Peter stops, it stops. He rubs the spot again, the leg begins as soon as he moves his fingers. It’s like an engine.

  “Jimmy can’t smell it,” she says. “He lets them lick his face, crawl all over his clothes.”

  The other dog has rolled in against Peter’s leg and is lying on its back, its tongue spilled out of its mouth and resting on the couch. “They’re a little ripe,” he admits.

  “They get all over him, Jimmy doesn’t smell it at all,” she says. “All over his clothes too, and you know how he is about them …” She shakes her head. “He’s got a fetish about his clothes.”

  It’s quiet another minute, and then she stares at him and says, “That’s one of them.”

  His eyes move to the grandfather clock near the door.

  She sees him do that, she sees everything. “Don’t get nervous,” she says, “everybody wants something different.”

  Peter suddenly finds himself wondering what she’s done in this house with Michael, what kept him coming back. He isn’t as interested in what she does with Jimmy—there isn’t much that Jimmy could want that would surprise him.

  The dog pushes his nose against Peter’s leg, reminding him he’s there. Peter rubs the animal’s neck and his leg begins to kick.

  “Like what?” he says.

  She looks at him then as if she were guessing his coat size. “Diapers,” she says finally.

  Michael in diapers.

  “Naw …” he says. He shakes his head.

  “Some people like it,” she says.

  He blinks. Michael in diapers.

  “They lie on the bed and have a diaper put on them,” she says, “and then we go across the street and drink until they have to go so bad they can’t hold it anymore, and after that happens we come back here and change.”

  He finds himself thinking of Michael’s mother, his Aunt Theresa, red-faced and out of breath from picking up their dirty underwear off the floor so they would have to wear what was in the drawer. “You get hit by the bus in dirty shorts,” she would say, “the nurses at the emergency room gonna
think we’re trash.”

  He thinks of Michael in an emergency room in diapers; he thinks of the things that can hit you in the street.

  “I never heard of that before,” he says. “Diapers.”

  She shrugs. “Some people like it,” she says. And then she puts the dogs outside, and they go back across the street.

  They sit in the same place under the stained glass and drink, and Peter feels blessed.

  It is like the state of grace when he has touched a woman and fucked her and then watched her get back into her clothes for the first time—when that issue is off the table, and before there are new issues on the table that he never imagined were issues—when everything is calm.

  And in the calm he sees that he likes the idea of her coming in here with someone in diapers. He likes the idea of the secret. The wet pants, that’s still a little hard to see.

  “What you were talking about before,” he says, “did you mean Jimmy, or was it Michael?”

  She looks at him a long minute, until he is sorry he asked the question. Until it feels as if he’s done something worse to Jimmy Measles than put a hand up his wife’s skirt.

  “I wouldn’t tell if it was you,” she says.

  It is storming the afternoon they come to the gym. Peter is sitting in the corner, dabbing at his lip with a stiff, yellowed towel that has been lying on the same spot on the bench for eight years he can remember, getting stiffer and yellower, and has begun lately to taste like fish.

  Nick is in another corner of the room, soaked in his own sweat, hitting the soft bag with punches he seems to throw without trying. That is where he always finishes after they box, on the heavy bags. Old habits. There is no one else in the room.

  The door opens downstairs, and Peter smells the rain.

  They come up slowly, Monk first, his eyes squinting as he clears the darkness of the staircase, then Michael, dripping rain, walking on a cane, then a weight lifter named Leonard Crawley, who has Bobby the Jap’s place, then Jimmy Measles.

  They stand in a spot near the ring; puddles collect on the floor. Nick hits the bag.

  Peter has never spoken to Leonard Crawley, but he has heard him talking to Monk in the front seat of the limo. He wonders out loud sometimes, in a wistful sort of way, what sound a human back makes as it breaks.