Brotherly Love (18 page)

Jimmy Measles closes the door and then leans against
the wall and lights a cigarette. The sound of the music is louder
here and Jimmy Measles begins to dance. Just his body, not his feet.
It seems to happen by itself.

"You go in after Michael," he says, moving
underneath his coat.

Peter looks at him, not understanding.

"She don’t care how many guys she blows,"
he says. The music is louder now, and Peter imagines her on her knees
inside the room, holding Michael’s wilted penis in her mouth,
hearing the music. Hearing her chance to dance on television today
passing by.

"She doesn’t want to blow anybody else,"
he says.

Jimmy Measles shrugs. He says, "What’s that
got to do with it?"

Somewhere there is a cry. Peter isn’t sure where it
comes from, but it doesn’t seem to be part of the noise that is
filling the hallway from the studio.

Jimmy Measles is moving his feet now, the cigarette
hanging on his lip, doing some dance Peter has seen him practice
outside the gym.

"You hear that?" Peter says.

Jimmy Measles stops dancing and looks at the door.

"What?"

Something breaks inside.

Jimmy Measles takes a last pull off his cigarette,
spikes it against the wall, and opens the door. He stands still a
moment and then walks in.

Peter hears something unnatural in his voice. "Easy,
my man," he says, "take it easy . . ."

The girl is lying on her back when Peter steps back
into the room, Michael sitting over her, one knee on each side,
holding the vodka bottle by its neck, as if he were deciding whether
or not to hit her again.

Her forehead is opened up and her hair is wet and
dull with blood. The desk is moved off its spot, the imprint of its
legs in the carpet. Jimmy Measles steps behind Michael and, keeping
his pants clear, lifts him off the girl.

She does not move when Michael is pulled off her, but
lies still, staring at the ceiling.

"Easy, man," Jimmy Measles says. "Calm
down." But Michael is already calm. He stares at the girl,
breathing through his mouth, still holding the bottle in his hand.

"Jesus," Jimmy Measles says, looking at
her.

Michael steps over her to collect his pants. He
watches her while he dresses; he seems fascinated that she doesn’t
move. Jimmy Measles bends over her and looks in her eyes.

"Maureen," he says, "you there?"

He slaps her lightly across the cheek, she doesn’t
seem to notice. He stands up and turns to Peter. "I think she’s
got a concussion," he says.
 

Michael stands up to button his pants and then puts
his feet in his sneakers. He looks at her in a disconnected way, as
if she were something to step over on the sidewalk.

The girl moves a little on the floor; her face turns
one way and then the other, and then she vomits.

Jimmy Measles says, "Jesus Christ," and she
vomits again. The smell fills the room, the smell and the music. One
of her feet begins to shake spasmodically and the shoe on it—a
loafer that has already slipped off her heel—drops onto the floor.

Michael sets the bottle back on the desk.

"We got to call somebody," Jimmy Measles
says. His lingers run through his hair, and Peter sees that they are
shaking. It is quiet in the room for a moment, then the girl burps
and a thin, bubbly film emerges from a corner of her mouth.

Jimmy Measles looks up at Michael and smiles in a way
that looks like maybe he’s going to be sick too.

"What do we do with this?" he says.

Michael studies the girl, disconnected. Something to
step over on the sidewalk.

"I’ll call my old
man," he says.

* * *

T
he two men who drive
Michael and Peter are sitting in chairs in the basement of a house in
the Northeast. The wire holding them together cuts into their wrists,
and their hands beneath the wire have turned blue.

It is eleven o’clock at night; the girl is at the
University of Pennsylvania Hospital and Peter’s uncle has not
spoken a word since they left the house. Not during the long ride
over, not when they stopped in front of the brick duplex and got out.
Not when they walked down the stairs to the basement.

One of the men sitting in the chairs looks up at
Peter’s uncle; he does not speak. His eyes come to Peter, and then
move on to Michael. The other one sits with his head down, knowing
there is no help.

"Francis, tell me what I told you."

Peter hears the edge in his uncle’s voice. The man
who knows there is no help lifts his head and then shakes it. "You
said to watch them," he says.

His uncle nods.

"And what’d you do?"

"We went for a coffee," he says.

"Is that how you watch somebody, go for a
coffee?"

The man doesn’t answer.

"Phil . . ." the other one says.

Phillip Flood turns his head slowly.

"We thought they was with Nick, that’s all. We
went for a coffee."

His uncle seems to think that over. He thinks it
over, and then nods his head, and when he speaks again there is
something reasonable in his voice.

"Was I talkin’ to you?" he says.

The man drops his head without answering. Phillip
Flood picks up a piece of pipe two feet long and steps closer to the
men. There are other men in the room; they stand in the corners and
wait. Peter looks away just before his uncle swings.

The pipe lands three times, soft landings, and the
only other sound in the room is his uncle’s uneven breathing.

The noises stop and his uncle is staring at him.

"What are you doing?" he says.

"Nothing."

"You think I brought you down here to look at
the fucking floor?"

Peter shakes his head. His cousin stares at the men
in the chairs, excited.

"I brought youse down here to see something,
right? To see what happened ’cause you didn’t stay where I told
you."

Peter’s eyes move from his cousin to his uncle to
the men in the chairs. The flesh on each side of the wires is
beginning to swell. One of the men moans.

Peter stares at the broken wrists. The man who moaned
leans forward, his face pale and damp, and vomits quietly onto the
cement floor.

And seeing that, Peter vomits too.

His uncle watches, and slowly nods his head.

"That’s better,"
he says.

* * *

H
e climbs out of his
window that night and sits with his bare feet against the cold side
of the house. He studies the yard twenty feet underneath him, the
black car parked across the street with the men inside watching.

The door to his room opens suddenly, and the light
catches him on the ledge. He turns and sees his uncle walking in,
looking at his empty bed, then, feeling the cold, at the window. It
seems to startle him, to find Peter sitting in the window.

"The fuck you doin’ out there?" he says.
"It’s freezing."

Peter doesn’t answer; he doesn’t know.

His uncle sits on the bed, looking nervous. He takes
a deep breath.

"You ain’t going to Nick’s no more," he
says.

Peter doesn’t answer. He thinks of the fall last
time, of pushing himself off this same edge and the moment afterward,
in the air. "You hear what I told you‘?"

The boy nods, sensing the fear in his uncle. It’s
an old, familiar fear, but the boy can’t delineate the threat. Only
that it is connected in some way to his father. Beyond that, he
doesn’t know what he holds over him, only that without it, he is
helpless.

Except he can fall. The moment is always in his
hands.

"I’m telling Nick the same thing," his
uncle says. "You and Michael show up, he throws you out. When
you two get out of school, somebody brings you straight home."

The boy looks back into the room, and his uncle
shakes his head and laughs in an uneasy way, as if he had forgotten
that he was angry.

"You like high places," he says.

He nods again.

"Even after you jumped out the window, fucked up
your legs like that, you ain’t scared. That’s good."

He is trying to tell him something now, trying to get
to that thing between them that is always there, and is always beyond
his reach.

Without moving an inch, the boy pulls away. His
uncle’s laugh settles and dies, with nothing in the room to sustain
it. It is quiet a long time.

"I want you stayin’ away from that gym,"
he says finally.

Peter begins to shake his head.

"You two don’t know better than what you did,
Nick don’t know better than to let you, after I go up there myself
and tell him the situation, then everybody stays home and don’t get
in trouble."

The boy sees the anger rise in his uncle’s face
again, and thinks of the two men sitting in the chairs, connected at
the wrists with wire.

"I’ll stay right there at Nick’s . . ."
he says.

His uncle suddenly looks at him as if he might stand
up and push him off the ledge himself. "You didn’t hear what I
told you?" he says.

He is angry, and then he is afraid. Peter’s father
is always there between them. His uncle thinks a long time.

"You heard it that I popped Constantine‘?"
he says finally.

The boy nods. His uncle stands up and walks to the
door, and stops there to look at the boy again.

"Anything you hear about it," he says,
"it’s bullshit. The thing I’m telling you is this: That was
for your father."

And then he steps into the
light of the hallway and closes the door behind him.

* * *

N
ick turns the corner,
carrying a Danish for the old man wrapped in a napkin in his pocket,
and sees the black Cadillac parked in the middle of the street. The
old man is standing in the door of the garage, holding a broom behind
his shoulder, like a baseball bat. His face is red and he is
sputtering at the two men in front of him. The men are both wearing
casts from their elbows to their fingers. They stand just outside the
arc of the old man’s broom, looking at each other as if they don’t
know what to do.

Nick crosses the street and hears one of them talking
to the old man. "Listen," he says, "just go in there
and tell Nick that Phillip Flood wants to talk to him. That he’s
waitin’ in the car . . ."

The old man listens to that, then steps forward and
swings the broom. The swing is slow, the wind taking away what little
power he has, and pulls him off balance.

One of them smiles.

The old man stumbles and then regains his footing and
cocks the broom behind his shoulder again. Nick passes the car,
seeing the shadow of Phillip Flood’s head behind the dark glass
windows, and then steps onto the sidewalk and pries the broom out of
Urban Matthews’s hands. He smells the old man’s excitement.

"Leave me have it," he says quietly, and
the old man lets go and then steps back into the garage and sits on a
box of motor oil. Nick holds the broom and looks at the men in casts.

The back door of the Cadillac opens and Phillip Flood
climbs out slowly, looking around as if he had never seen this place
before. He looks at Nick without smiling and then walks, uninvited,
into the garage. The men with the casts turn to watch the street.

Nick walks into the garage behind him, his sight
adjusting to the dark. The old man follows them with tired eyes. He
hacks  deep in his throat and then drops his head to spit
between his shoes.

Phillip Flood stops and turns around. Nick puts his
hands in his pockets and waits; he feels the old man’s Danish. He
thinks of the letter from Iowa, the neat, Catholic-school
handwriting. His daughter. He is suddenly sure that the old man has a
daughter.

"I ask you a couple of favors, Nick,"
Phillip Flood says, building to something. "Teach the kids to
take care of themself, watch out for them up here until this thing
about Constantine cools off . . ."

Nick takes the Danish out of his pocket, careful to
hold it with the napkin, and hands it that way to the old man. "Go
on upstairs," he says.

The old man looks at him, not moving.

"It’s all right," Nick says. "You
hear shooting down here, get your broom and come on back down."

He stands up slowly and heads toward the stairs.

"They’re doing all right," Nick says to
Phillip Flood.

Phillip Flood makes a circle with his fingers and
thumb and moves his hand up and down, as if he were whacking himself
off.

"One of them’s coming home every night all
bunged up, the other one’s never got a scratch."