Brotherly Love

by Pete Dexter

  They are on the couch twenty minutes when the noises start upstairs. There is a bump and another bump, and then a bump that shakes the ceiling. Jimmy begins to yell.

  Peter sets his drink on the floor and slowly stands up.

  Jimmy Measles is standing on the edge of the bed when Peter opens the door. He holds out the flat of his hand to warn him not to come any closer, as if it were a suicide.

  Peter says, “Jimmy, I refuse to talk you down off a bed.”

  He dives from the bed to the floor then—dives without arc, the way timid children dive into swimming pools, leaning forward and down to meet the water—and lands on his stomach. The clock falls off the night table. He lies still a minute, as if trying to remember where he is.

  Peter sits down on the floor next to him. “The hell, Jimmy,” he says, “you didn’t say you were over there when they did it.”

  Jimmy Measles gets slowly to his hands and knees and crawls back to the edge of the bed. He has scraped the skin off his elbows, and one of them is beginning to bleed.

  “They wouldn’t let me get the dogs,” he says, pulling himself up. He crawls onto the bed and then, unsteadily, he stands.

  “I said to them, ‘I don’t care what you do, let me get my dogs out of here first.’ ”

  He dives again, and this time Peter thinks he has knocked himself out. Jimmy Measles lies dead still half a minute, his nose pressed into the carpet, and when he looks up again there are rug burns on his chin and his forehead.

  “You turn yourself into a human scab, you keep this up,” Peter says.

  Jimmy drops his face back onto the floor, and his words still seem to be inside his body, something Peter overhears. “I asked him, the guy at the door, could I please have the dogs. He wouldn’t answer. I can hear them in the back, barking at the one in the basement, but the guy at the door wouldn’t let me in.”

  His face comes up off the rug, and he is fighting for his breath. The atomizer is on the floor near the night table, and Peter reaches it and hands it to him. Jimmy Measles puts it in his mouth and pumps the trigger with every breath he takes for half a minute, until it seems to settle him down.

  “I said to them, ‘It isn’t my business what you’re doing, just lemme get my dogs out of your way.’ ”

  The room is quiet while Jimmy Measles remembers it. “He wouldn’t answer,” he says. “I didn’t want to go in. If I walk in there, I’m dead, and it’s not even my business.”

  He pushes himself up again and takes as deep a breath as he can. His chest and stomach rise and fall, his face looks sunburned. “The one at the door said to go back across the street and call Michael, tell him what’s happening to his place,” he says. “I told him it’s my place, it isn’t Michael’s. But he just says I better go back across the street.”

  Peter sits still and Jimmy begins working in the direction of the bed.

  “I called Michael,” he says, “but Leonard says he’s asleep. And then, while I’m still on the phone, I hear a noise, it sounds like somebody blowing out a candle, and it shakes the house. And when I looked out the window, the inside of the place is already orange.”

  It is quiet again, he is remembering the dogs. Remembering that he walked across the street and left them.

  Peter thinks of something Nick said once about dying. That the nuns had it wrong, you have to be grateful. Peter knows that means something here, but it is just out of his reach.

  “A fire like that, they were dead in five seconds,” he says finally.

  Peter sits still and Jimmy Measles lowers his face until it is resting again on the floor. He has tried to call Michael, he’s beaten up a parking meter and thrown himself off the bed; and none of it has made any difference.

  He goes to sleep.

  Peter takes the blanket off the bed and covers him, but before he leaves the room, Jimmy kicks it off and curls toward the far wall, away from the light.

  Early in the morning, Michael comes about the money.

  He and Leonard Crawley duck under the police barrier across the front of the club, Peter following a few steps behind, and they walk into the burned-out doorway, stopping when Michael is hidden in the shadows.

  He sends Leonard across the street to knock on the door. Monk has parked the car and is walking slowly in the direction of the club, checking the parked cars and doorways for the Italians.

  Michael stands still, dripping sweat inside his silk shirt, but it is not the old men in the raincoats he is afraid to see.

  He watches Leonard push the bell, half a dozen times. The door opens a few inches, and he sees half her face, her hair falling over the shoulder of her robe as she hugs the door to listen to what he says.

  She shifts her eyes and searches the building Michael is standing in. Michael backs deeper inside and her eyes do not fix on the movement.

  Peter goes into the cooler and finds himself a warm Coke. Half a minute later, Leonard makes his way back through the bar, kicking pieces of burned furniture, breaking glass. Peter watches him come.

  His cousin stands in a puddle of black water under the chandelier in the restaurant, still staring at the house across the street.

  He trembles, wanting to hurt her.

  “He’s comin’,” Leonard says. “His old lady said he’s in bed, she’ll get him up.”

  Leonard notices a chair that the fire has missed. He picks it up, brushing off the dust, and sets it behind Michael. “Take a load off,” he says. “He ain’t here in three minutes, I’ll go back and get him out the fuckin’ bed myself.”

  Michael sits down and crosses his legs, and a few minutes later Jimmy Measles walks into the club. Monk comes in behind him, looks at Michael and shrugs.

  Jimmy Measles moves through the place slowly, looking everywhere at once, as if this were the first time he’d seen the damage. His eyes are red, he has not shaved in two days and there is a vague peppermint shading to the smell of alcohol he is giving off. There are scabs on his forehead and chin.

  “You’re shit-faced, right?” Michael says.

  Jimmy Measles smiles, looking at the room. Michael looks only at Jimmy Measles.

  “Lenny said you called the night before last.”

  “When they killed my dogs.”

  Michael nods, as if he understands. “I heard that. Pally told me that. Told me I ought to come over, see what I could do. He’s been tellin’ me what to do all the time lately, did you notice that?”

  Peter feels Leonard Crawley’s eyes settle on him.

  Jimmy Measles reaches into his pocket for the atomizer, and uses it twice. He has tucked his pajama tops into his pants and a corner is stuck in his zipper. He is still wearing his slippers.

  “What is that fuckin’ thing, anyway?” Michael says.

  “It’s so I can breathe, when I got asthma.”

  Michael takes a deep breath of his own, lets it go. He shrugs. “So,” he says, “what’re we gonna do, keep you breathin’?”

  Jimmy Measles cannot bring himself to meet Michael’s eyes. “That’s what I called you for,” he says, looking at a section of collapsed flooring, “to see what we could do.”

  “You insured?”

  Jimmy Measles smiles. “I wouldn’t call you the middle of the night about insurance, I called on account of the dogs.…”

  “The money don’t matter to you, is that what you’re tellin’ me?”

  “It’s complicated,” Jimmy Measles says. “The insurance likes to make it complicated.”

  Michael shakes his head. “What’s complicated, Jimmy, you owe me fifty-five thousand.”

  It is quiet a moment and then a sparrow flies onto one of the window ledges, and then into the room. Leonard picks up a piece of burnt floor and begins to follow it.

  Michael says, “Let me ask you again, you insured or what?”

  “I got insurance,” Jimmy Measles says, “but the insurance guys, they’re going to try to say I did my own place. It can take a long time.”

  The bird lands
and then moves as Leonard gets close. He corners it in a pile of soaked carpet near the kitchen, and swings as it flies over his head. The wood falls apart in his hands, the heavy end crosses the room spinning and hits the wall.

  Michael is talking to Jimmy again. “If what you’re tryin’ to tell me here, that it can take a long time to get paid, I got to tell you that a long time don’t do me no fuckin’ good, Jimmy. Just so there’s no confusion on that, a long time ain’t good for anybody.”

  Jimmy Measles says, “I thought maybe, you know, because it was part of your problems with the Italians that I got burned down …”

  “My problems are my problems,” he says, coming out of the chair, “your problems are yours.…”

  Jimmy Measles opens his mouth to say something, Michael stops him. “… and the only problem we got together is the fifty-five thousand.”

  Leonard Crawley wanders the room, picking up pieces of things that fall apart in his hands. He finds a scorched beer bottle and tosses it through a small window, one that the fire department missed.

  “What the fuck you doin’ in there?” Michael says.

  Leonard comes back into the restaurant, crosses his arms and leans against the wall.

  Michael stands over Jimmy Measles. “You want some help,” he says, “I understand that. I’m comin’ to you like a friend, and I’m tellin’ you to get the fifty-five thousand. You fight some insurance prick a year to get your money, by the time he pays, you owe it all anyway, a point a week—I’m talkin’ about business here—plus, you got the whole year to worry about it. So as a friend, I’d tell the insurance prick let’s do something here gets us both off the hook.”

  He looks at his cousin. “Am I right, Pally?”

  Peter stands completely still.

  “All of a sudden, he quits telling me what to do,” Michael says. He turns back to Jimmy Measles. “Maybe your wife’s got something she could let you have.”

  Jimmy Measles shakes his head and Michael shakes his head with him, imitating the motion.

  “It was me, I’d shake her till the change falls out her pussy. This ain’t a game, Jimmy. What’s happened, she ought to appreciate you’re in a spot.”

  Jimmy Measles shakes his head but he is thinking it over. “You could ask her,” Michael says. “What harm does it do to ask?”

  Leonard nods, agreeing with that. The wires holding his jaw in place shine in the wet cave behind his lips. Peter watches him, thinking of the old man tied to his water heater in the basement.

  “See what you do,” Michael is saying, “you take care of the fifty-five, I’ll get you a couple new dogs.”

  Jimmy Measles lights a cigarette, then puts his hands in his pockets, ashamed at their shaking. He walks past Leonard Crawley on the way out, and then, before he leaves the room, he looks quickly at Peter, and smiles.

  Jimmy Measles is sitting on the bed in his underwear. He is holding a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other. His atomizer is on the night table.

  His wife is packing her clothes. There are four full suitcases already crowded near the door, as if they were waiting in line to get out, and her closet looks as full to him as when she started.

  She is doing shoes now, a suitcase full of shoes. She takes them out of the closet two pairs at a time and holds them a moment, making calculations he doesn’t understand. Some she puts in the suitcase, some she throws into the corner.

  Watching from the bed, Jimmy Measles can’t see much difference between what she keeps and what she tosses out, but he knows that once she decides, she isn’t going to go back through the pile for another look.

  There are sweaters in the corner too, and half a dozen dresses of the wrong length to be in fashion. Fashion. One day he notices more of her legs under her skirt, and by the end of the week every woman he sees in the street is wading the same depth. It has occurred to him that she controls it.

  He finishes the drink in his hand and reaches for the bottle on the floor. Vodka. He loses his balance but catches himself just as he begins to fall off the bed.

  He sits up and pours. He fills the glass, covering a tiny, festive umbrella on the bottom that floats slowly up and then hangs suspended halfway to the top. All the ice is gone, it is half an hour since he had ice. He hates the taste of warm liquor, but he cannot bring himself to leave the room, even for the two minutes it would take to go to the kitchen.

  He has a vague feeling of holding on to her now, and that leaving the room he would be letting go. He puts the glass against his lips, and then, without drinking, trades it for the cigarette.

  An ash falls onto his chest, rolls half a foot down and is caught in the folds of his lime-colored shorts. All of Jimmy Measles’s underwear is the color of fruit.

  She was working on her eyes when he asked her. “Listen, I don’t like to mention it, but we got a problem with the club …”

  Her hair was still wet from the shower, he’d made himself a gimlet in the kitchen.

  She watched him in the mirror, still holding the mascara pencil in her hand. Still scared from the fire.

  “The thing is, there’s some loans I took to do the remodeling, they got to be paid back.”

  “Your friend Michael,” she said.

  “I was thinking maybe your father could help us out, maybe put us together with an attorney that sues insurance companies or something, dig us out of the hole on the loan, and then we pay it back when we get the insurance.”

  Slowly, she shook her head no.

  “Fifty-five thousand,” he said. “We do it right now, it’s only fifty-five thousand.”

  And she stood up, went into the closet and came out with a suitcase. And a few minutes later he got the bottle, and settled into a spot on the bed to watch.

  “You know,” he says now, “it looks disloyal, you walking after I get burned out.…”

  She is holding a pair of red shoes as he speaks, and for a moment she seems to lose her purpose. She stands still, surrounded by the suitcases and the evidence of what she is doing, and she thinks it over.

  And in the end, she decides to keep the red shoes.

  She finishes packing and Jimmy follows her downstairs.

  “There’s other ways I can get the money,” he says.

  She stares out the window, waiting for her sister. The suitcases are all over the living room, he has no idea how many there are. She is sitting on one of them.

  The sister is younger than Grace and lives in Cherry Hill, just across the Delaware River in New Jersey. He allows for traffic and thinks he might have another fifteen minutes, and then she is gone.

  “It seemed like the least complicated thing, asking your father,” he says, “but there’s other ways.”

  Her makeup is done now, her hair is brushed and shines; she took care of that before she called. He hears the words: “Bring the station wagon.”

  He is drawn to her appearance, even now. Looking at her, he reminds himself that it isn’t just anybody who has a woman like this to lose. It establishes a standard, he thinks; anyone who has ever seen them together knows his standard.

  Even as she is on the way out the door, Jimmy Measles sees himself in her reflection.

  “I could borrow the money,” he says. “I just thought of a guy.”

  She keeps her eyes on the street, watching for the station wagon. It’s a Volvo—the sister also has a Mercedes, one child and no husband. Her father keeps her in cars and in the house in Cherry Hill. Jimmy Measles remembers the father, taking him aside at the wedding reception. You ever raise your hand against my daughter, I’ll have somebody to cut it off.

  He smiles, everybody’s a gangster.

  “And what’s this guy you thought of going to do when you can’t pay him?” Grace says.

  He does not answer.

  “He’s going to send some fucking monster to the door to tell me to get your ass out of bed, only this time maybe you aren’t home.”

  He sees that happen as she says it; and he is lost in remo
rse.

  The bottle is on the floor near his chair. He picks it up, holding it at eye level, and pours until the glass is half full. The umbrella lies at the bottom, barely stirring under the wash of new vodka.

  “Sometimes you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he says finally. “Sometimes that’s the way things happen.”

  A horn sounds outside, and Grace stands up without saying another word. She squares her shoulders under the weight of the first two suitcases, and steps out the door, leaving him there like someone she’d met while she was waiting for her plane.

  He goes into the kitchen, drops some ice into his glass, and sits at the table until she is gone.

  Even with the sister helping, it takes a long time to get all her luggage out of the house.

  They are somewhere in Delaware when Michael turns the conversation from horses to fighters, and then to Nick and Harry.

  “What I’d like to do,” Leonard Crawley says, “is have the little motherfucker in the street, see how he does there.”

  Leonard looks in the rearview mirror to see if Peter is listening. He senses Peter sliding away from Michael’s protection; he senses that Peter feels it too.

  Most of the people Leonard Crawley has known, he has hurt. Until he hurts them, there is something to settle. Some fear to quiet. He has never reflected on whose fear it is.

  He locks on Peter’s eyes, half a second, feeling it, and then looks back at the road. “All that shit with rules,” he says, shaking his head, “useless in the street.”

  They are out on I-95 South again, on the way back to Maryland. Michael’s man has found him another horse.

  Peter tries to remember the things Michael has bought in the last year that he doesn’t need. The limo, a condominium in Atlantic City, a fur coat and now a horse.

  He looks in the mirror and sees Leonard Crawley watching him again. Leonard smiles.

  Peter leans forward until he can see Leonard’s face, the wires holding it together. “Lemme ask you something, Leonard,” he says, “you think Nick’s kid ate breakfast this morning through a straw?”

  “That wasn’t the street,” he says. “What I said, I’d like to have him in the street.”