Brotherly Love

by Pete Dexter

  Nick crosses the gym, smiling. “Hey, how you been? This place, it’s like a fucking museum here the last couple of weeks.” He puts an arm around Peter, smelling of gasoline, and pats his back.

  Peter is washed in relief.

  The buzzer sounds and Harry quits jumping rope. There are welts across his back and shoulders where the rope has hit him. He is soaked in sweat. “You got time to move a couple rounds?” Peter says.

  Nick ties and tapes his gloves, and then twenty minutes later he unties them.

  Peter sits on the bench, trying to even his breathing. He closes his eyes and rests his head against the wall. Harry thanks him for the work and crosses the room to hit the heavy bag. Nick tugs at the gloves. “You going to live?” he says.

  The question terrifies him.

  He smiles and rolls his head against the wall. “It was up to me,” he says, “no.”

  The gloves come off, and his hands feel cool and light, and he stands up and walks into the shower.

  He stays under the water a long time, letting it run into his mouth. When he comes out Harry is still hitting the bags.

  He sits down with Nick and they watch his son work. “He looks like he just got up from a nap,” Peter says. The punches have a heavy sound, interrupted now and then by a sharp crack—an air pocket created between the glove and the leather bag.

  “That was bad news about Jimmy Measles,” Nick says after a while.

  Peter checks his side, where some of the skin has scraped off against the ropes. He takes a deep breath to see if anything hurts. “He got into something,” he says, “he couldn’t get out.”

  Nick thinks of him up here, talking to four people at once over by the lockers. “He always seemed like he could get out of anything,” he says.

  Peter wipes fresh sweat off his head.

  “I liked havin’ him around,” Nick says later. “He was a character.”

  Peter says, “His only trouble, he was ashamed of himself. I think about it now, it seems like everything he did was to hide what he was.”

  “That guy could make you laugh,” Nick says.

  “Yeah, he could.”

  Peter tried to remember when Jimmy Measles had made him laugh.

  “Where you been?” Nick says, a different question than what he asked before, when he came in.

  Peter shakes his head. “You know, Michael brought the guy up here and got you upset.”

  Nick nods at that. “Something’s different, you don’t know how to act.” He looks at Peter and smiles. “Maybe three times in your life something new happens and you know the right thing to do. The rest of the time …” He shrugs.

  Peter falls quiet, looks around the gym.

  “Anyway,” Nick says, “nobody got hurt. It wasn’t anything but his jaw was broke, right?”

  Peter nods. “Still wired,” he says. “I think maybe he likes it, makes him look scary.”

  “He ain’t eating, he must of lost some of them muscles by now.”

  Peter thinks about it, picturing Leonard Crawley. “No,” he says, “everything he likes, he takes it through the nose anyway.”

  Nick is picturing Leonard Crawley too, and he begins to smile. “What it reminded me of, you know at the start of a fight you look across the ring, and you’re always thinkin’ there’s gotta be some mistake? That this guy ain’t the same weight, you ain’t sure he can even talk? The guy with Michael was what you always imagined was across the ring, and it turns out he can’t fight anyway. So what’s the harm in that?”

  “They come up here like everything was theirs.”

  Nick shrugs, looks around the room. “They didn’t take nothing out but what they brought in.”

  The limo is parked outside Peter’s apartment when he gets back from the gym. The engine is running and a shallow pool of water collects underneath it, and spills over into little streams that run from there to the curb, condensation from the air conditioner.

  Peter gets out of his Buick, exhausted and calm. The bag with his cup and his shoes and his wet clothes hangs from his hand, dead weight. He stares at the limo and waits.

  The dark back window hums and stops, the sun picking up the blues in the tint. Above it, one third of his cousin’s face stares out.

  “You’re gettin’ harder to find all the time,” Michael says.

  Peter walks to the car; the door opens. “Lemme throw this shit in the trunk, we don’t smell it,” he says.

  “The trunk’s full.”

  Michael slides across the back seat, making room, and Peter takes the spot where he had been.

  Leonard is behind the steering wheel, a man Peter has never seen before is sitting next to him. Another weight lifter.

  Peter shuts the door and the limo pulls into the street. They drive out of town on Broad Street, past the stadiums and get on I-95.

  “You popped the lawyer,” Peter says. It is quiet a moment. “They’ll be coming for us now.”

  Michael smiles. “Maybe not,” he says.

  Peter looks at him, waiting.

  “They still want to do business,” Michael says. “We still got something they want.”

  Peter doesn’t say a word.

  “He was gettin’ infected,” Michael says. “He goes delirious at night, making so much noise I can’t sleep in my own house, what am I supposed to do?”

  Peter leans back into the cushioned seat and positions his legs, one at a time, on the seat in front of him, beginning to feel stiff. He tries not to picture the man in the trunk, and in the trying he sees him, lying on the cot in the house. The man’s eyes are closed, and then, when Peter speaks to him, he looks up. He says, “Are you the one that kills me?”

  “There’s no reason we have to take care of this ourselves,” Peter says to Michael.

  Michael says, “The reason is, I want to make sure it’s done right. I know the place to do this.”

  “What place?”

  “A place Phil showed me.”

  And it is quiet again before Michael says, “What we’re saying, if it comes up, the guy was fine when he left the house.”

  “If it comes up,” Peter says.

  It is quiet in the car.

  “You did it in the house?”

  Michael shrugs. “Him screaming like that, I couldn’t see moving him someplace else.…”

  The car passes the airport and begins to accelerate. Peter watches the man sitting next to Leonard, wondering if he was swinging one of the bats too.

  “You haven’t heard from his people?” Peter says.

  “There’s some guys come around a few places, asking. That’s all.”

  The limo brakes, coming up behind a van, and Leonard straightens his whole body against the horn. The van moves to the shoulder of the road, and the limo goes past. The pitch of the tires climbs an octave and levels.

  “Tell him to slow down,” Peter says.

  Leonard looks in the rearview mirror; Michael shrugs. Leonard changes the angle of the mirror to glance at Peter, then puts it back. The new man watches him, memorizing everything he does.

  Michael says, “See, there was a problem with what you said, for us to explain to them how it happened.”

  Peter waits for Michael to tell him the problem.

  “Time,” he says. “The longer we waited, the worse it looked. The afternoon you come over, it was already a day, a day and a half. If I turn him over then, it looks like I decided to do one thing and got scared, tried to do something else. It makes us look weak.”

  Peter sits up and looks over Leonard’s shoulder at the speedometer. Eighty-five.

  “He gets a body in back, he thinks he’s an ambulance,” Peter says.

  Michael looks into the front seat and says, “Lenny,” and the car begins to slow. They ride for a while in silence, into Delaware, the sun low and wide in the west.

  “You know,” Michael says, a long time later, “we got a situation here, Pally, and it don’t feel like you want your part of it.”

 
Peter doesn’t answer.

  “Pally?”

  Slowly, Peter nods. “That’s it,” he says, “I don’t want my part.”

  And it is quiet again. There is a glow in the sky where the sun has gone down. The state could be on fire. Without wanting to, he thinks again of the man in the trunk, lying in the dark with his broken legs, shaking as if he were cold as the tires vibrate against the road.

  Michael directs them off the freeway and then down a dirt road to a spot behind some trees. “Right here,” he says, and Leonard stops the car.

  Peter steps out and looks around. There is enough moonlight to cast shadows. Leonard opens the trunk and finds a shovel, and hands it to the man who has been riding with him in the front seat.

  The new man digs as if this were a job he wanted to keep. Dirt flies in front of him, over his shoulder, left and right. Leonard backs out of range, until he is standing at the car with Michael and Peter. He crosses his arms over his chest and watches. Once in a while he disappears into the trees and returns with a runny nose.

  It is a quiet place. The kid grunts, Leonard sniffs, somewhere a long ways off there is a noise that might be a fire alarm. Except for that, they could all be in the ground themselves.

  The quiet grows and the sound of the sniffing grates on Michael’s nerves. He looks at Leonard and says, “How many shovels you brought?”

  “Two or three, I threw some in there.”

  Michael stares at him until he understands, and goes back to the trunk and gets a shovel for himself, jerking it from the trunk when it catches on something inside. A little piece of the plastic they used to wrap the man inside comes out with it.

  Leonard takes off his shirt and lays it carefully across the hood of the car before he steps into the shallow hole. The kid takes off his shirt too; chains dangle in the moonlight.

  Peter watches a little longer and then climbs back in the car and closes his eyes. Time passes, and he hears Leonard’s voice. “Michael, how deep you want this fuckin’ hole anyway?”

  “Deep enough, the next time you break some guy’s legs in my house, you know you fucked up without me sayin’ it.”

  Later, he hears Leonard again. “Michael, you mind I ask you a personal question … Michael?”

  “What?”

  “What I want to ask you, I think maybe you used this hole before. All of a sudden, we’re diggin’ up bones and shit like that.”

  Peter sits up in the back seat of the car. Leonard and the kid are standing chest-high in their hole, Michael is leaning over them, getting edgy now. “Get out of there,” he says, “that’s deep enough.”

  Peter stares at his cousin, suspended for a moment in the thought that his own father could be in the ground here too.

  The men climb out, shaking the dirt out of their pants, and go back to the trunk. There are bumping noises behind Peter’s seat. The car drops and lifts, and then he sees them carrying the lawyer, encased in a clear plastic mattress cover, to the hole. The new man walks backwards, and seems to have the heavy end.

  They walk in short, uneven steps; the mattress cover sags, the man inside sways as if he were in a hammock.

  Michael steps aside, giving them room. The new man stops, his arms shaking under the weight, waiting for some signal to let go. Leonard drops his end without ceremony, pulling the new man off balance.

  There is no noise at all as the body hits bottom.

  The new man hangs at the edge of the grave, motionless in that long second between falling and finding his balance—a tightrope walker—and then, recovering himself, he is suddenly staring into the hole.

  Leonard goes back to the trunk for the lime. The new man is still looking into the hole when he comes back carrying the sack. He sets it down heavily and tears off the top. Then, as he lifts it shoulder-high to pour, Peter hears the new man’s voice, so timid it barely carries to the car, even in the quiet.

  “He’s in there crooked.”

  They are back on the interstate to Philadelphia when he thinks of the bones. In the seat next to him, Michael has made himself a drink.

  “I think we’re gonna be all right,” Michael says. “What do you think?”

  He looks at Peter, waiting.

  “What do you think?” he says.

  “I’m out of it,” Peter says.

  Two weeks pass, and in that time Peter answers his phone only once.

  The Italians again.

  “You understand something’s got to happen now, right?” the man says.

  Peter finds himself nodding.

  “You still got time,” he says, “you could save yourself. Your brother and the rest of them—today they’re here, tomorrow they’re not. It’s settled, except you got a chance to be here when they’re gone. We’re going to need somebody, you understand? We can’t just walk in and announce the unions are under new management.”

  It is quiet a moment.

  “Wait, he ain’t your brother,” the man says, “he’s your cousin. Makes it that much easier, right?”

  Peter hangs up.

  After the call, he spends every night at the house in Cape May, and comes into the city only in the afternoon to go to the gym. He fights as many rounds as Harry and Nick will give him.

  He does not see or talk to Michael.

  He barely talks to Nick. Even after they have boxed, he finds himself unable to speak more than a few sentences at once. The relief that comes with exhaustion is gone.

  On the way back to Cape May, he calls Grace at her sister’s house from a pay phone outside a bar on Admiral Wilson. One night he says to her, “I can’t make up my mind, you like having me around or not.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  Another night she asks him to masturbate while they talk.

  “Not in a phone booth,” he says.

  But he does.

  The next time he calls, her sister picks up the phone. “She isn’t home at the present time,” she says. “She’s got a date or something. May I take a message?”

  He goes back to the house in Cape May and thinks of other women. Women who have said they loved him and would search his face after he had fucked them for things that were familiar or simple—as if once they saw the stains, they could clean them.

  In the end, they couldn’t imagine his stains, and there was nothing they could give him.

  His business is with Grace.

  Michael appears again in the gym at six o’clock on a Monday afternoon. Peter has not seen him since the night they buried the lawyer.

  He makes no noise coming into the room. Leonard Crawley is with him, and Monk, and a black man named Eddie Bone, who was once a promising fighter.

  Peter remembers Eddie Bone, a true Philadelphia middleweight. He terrified the whole division, and then, before fighting could make him famous or rich, he killed his girlfriend and her mother and went away to Graterford.

  Eddie Bone looks around the small gym now and smiles.

  Peter thinks, It’s always the ones who smile at the wrong time.

  Nick looks up from his chair. He is sitting in bare feet and long pants, reading the newspaper. His son is shadowboxing in the ring.

  Michael crosses the wooden floor, leaving the others at the stairway. “Nick,” he says, “I got a guy here used to fight a little, I was thinking maybe Harry could work with him a couple of rounds, see if he’s got anything left.”

  Nick looks at Michael a moment, then at Eddie Bone. He folds the paper and puts it on the floor next to a cup of coffee. “We ain’t going to train today,” he says.

  Michael smiles. “Nothing serious,” he says, “just a couple rounds.”

  On the other side of the gym, Eddie Bone pulls his shirt over his head. A thick, raised scar runs on a diagonal from his shoulder down his chest and stomach. Peter stares at it, imagining the opening itself, the feeling of being opened. For a moment, the scar seems translucent.

  Eddie Bone steps out of his pants, smiling. The timer goes off and Harry ducks between the rop
es and out of the ring. “Harry,” Michael says, “how you doin’?”

  Harry doesn’t say a word.

  “I was askin’ your father here could you give my man Tyrone a couple of rounds.”

  Harry looks at his father, neither of them speaks. Leonard Crawley has crossed the floor now, and is standing over Nick. An odor comes off his skin and he is breathing through his mouth.

  On the other side of the ring Eddie Bone laces his shoes. Nick turns once to look at Peter, and there is almost a happiness in the look that it takes Peter a moment to understand.

  He sits where he is, pressed from both sides.

  Nick stands up, smiling an unnatural smile. “Lookit,” he says, nodding toward Eddie Bone, “we know who that is.”

  Leonard Crawley cocks his head to put his face near Nick’s. Michael smiles too.

  Peter hears Nick talking again.

  “You want to come in here and work out,” he says, “bring whoever you want. But that guy there”—he nods across the room—“he ain’t here to work out.”

  Michael turns and looks at Eddie Bone. Eddie is tying one of his hand wraps with his teeth, and smiles without letting go of the ribbon of cloth.

  “Harry ain’t ready yet for somebody can fight?” Michael says.

  Nick puts a cigarette in his mouth and lights it. His hands are slow and steady. “What I’m sayin’, this ain’t the place for somebody like that.”

  “It’s a gym, right? He’s a fighter.”

  “It’s my gym,” Nick says. “I built it myself, from my own idea, and bringing guys like that around …”—he points at Eddie Bone, then at Leonard—“and guys like this, wanting to see them hurt somebody, that ain’t what I built it for.”

  Leonard Crawley moves half a step closer to Nick, his head still cocked.

  Harry stands to one side, knowing something is happening, waiting to see where it will go.

  Monk leans against the wall, his arms crossed and his head down, embarrassed.

  Michael shrugs, as if it’s over. “You don’t want Harry to fight, he don’t have to fight,” he says.

  Nick nods, holding the cigarette between his teeth, ignoring Leonard Crawley.

  Michael looks at the ceiling and the walls. “I just thought maybe you’d want to do me a favor.”