Brotherly Love (19 page)

Nick shrugs. "One of them likes to fight,"
he says, "the other one don’t." He pauses. "You
can’t change human nature." He is careful not to say whose
human nature he is talking about. Phillip Flood puts the boys
together when he talks about them, but they are not the same to him.

"I’ll tell you about human nature,"
Phillip Flood says. But he doesn’t. He looks at the ceiling. "I
asked you to keep an eye on them two, this Constantine shit going on.
The next thing I know, they’re in some shit in West Philly,
smacking around some Jewish girl. My human nature is, I am very
disappointed."

Nick stares at him, trying to imagine Peter smacking
around a girl. It makes sense to him that the kid is going to have
his problems with girls, but not because he smacks them around. 
Peter is going to be the one doing the ducking; he’ll pick somebody
hard to live with.

He shakes his head, and seeing that, Phillip Flood
begins to nod. They stare at each other, holding an argument without
words.

"
Bandstand
,"
Phillip Flood says, still nodding, gaining momentum. "That’s
where they end up when they’re supposed to be with you. A fucking
television show."

Nick glances at the two men standing in the door.
Their casts fill the sleeves of their coats and they watch the street
as if violence didn’t matter any more to them than the weather.

Nick has the passing thought that once you start
scaring people to keep them honest, you’ve got to do it all the
time. You do it once, nothing else works. He has the passing thought
that Phillip Flood had better keep these two scared every minute of
their lives.

Phillip moves a step then, back into his line of
sight. He cuts off the direct light from the garage door, and Nick
suddenly senses himself being pushed into the back of his own place.

He doesn’t like that, he doesn’t like the way the
two men are standing in the doorway watching the street.

"What I come over here to tell you," he
says, "is I don’t want my boys up here no more. This time, it
ain’t a favor. They show up, you throw them out."

One of the men in the door hears the change in his
voice and turns to watch. His jacket is open, and sags to one side
with the weight of the gun in the pocket.

Nick stands still, a foot away from Phillip Flood,
studying his face. Watching his intentions change. He sees there is
nothing for him now but this moment in this place.

That is his advantage over Nick, not the two men in
the door.

He pictures Harry coming into the garage after school
and finding him on the floor over next to the compressed air tank,
and in the same moment he feels the edge of the workbench against his
hip. He has backed all the way to the rear of the garage.

The difference is that he has something to lose.

"You hear what I told you?" The voice is
almost a whisper.

Nick holds himself still, allows Phillip Flood to
inspect him in the dark, allows himself to be insulted.

"I got work to do," he says finally. "The
way I run the place, you decide if you want to come in, I decide if
you stay."

Then he steps forward, brushing past Phillip Flood,
and walks to the open hood of the car sitting half in and half out of
the garage.

Phillip Flood doesn’t follow him at first. He
stands where he is, still facing the back wall. Nick picks up a
wrench lying on a cloth on the car’s fender. The car is twelve
years old, and Nick covers the fender before he puts his tools there,
not to scratch it. He leans into the engine as if there were no one
behind him, as if there were no men standing in the doorway. As if he
had nothing to lose either.

He hears Phillip Flood’s feet on the concrete
floor, walking past. Nick feels a chill as he passes: the breeze, or
perhaps his shadow cutting off the light from the front door.

"You got a nice place, Nick," he says.

The steps move toward the front door, are almost out
the door, when the old man appears from the stairwell, holding the
broom like an ax, making a noise Nick has never heard before. A
terrified noise that seems, when Nick thinks about it later, as if it
might have come from the moment in his life when he stopped talking.

Phillip Flood makes a noise too, a short scream. He
falls away from the movement and the noise, stumbling over a jack,
and lands on the floor. The old man brings the broom down over his
head and hits him in the legs, and then, as fast as he appeared, he
is gone, back up the stairs.

The men help Phillip Flood to his feet. There are
grease stains on his coat, and his face is dark. Nick watches him a
moment longer, then puts his head back into the engine. Phillip Flood
doesn’t say a word. Nick hears a car door open and close, and then
two more doors, and then the Cadillac drives up Chadwick Street and
disappears.

A few minutes later, he looks up from the engine and
sees the old man standing at the foot of the stairs, still holding
the broom.

"Maybe you ought to go stay somewhere else a few
days," he says.

The old man stares at him, his mouth beginning to
move. Nick shakes his head and drops back under the hood.

"Don’t get excited," he says. "I
just mean there could be a problem until they cool off."

He says this more for
himself than the old man. He knows the old man isn’t going anywhere
else. He doesn’t have anywhere else, that’s what going after them
with the broom was about.

* * *

T
he first people on
Chadwick Street in the morning are the old women. They come out of
their doors at daybreak, dressed in their robes and slippers, and
sweep their sidewalks and steps.

A long time ago, they swept for their husbands, as
their husbands’ mothers had done for their men too. They were out
there every morning, before the men went to work, showing their
husbands—and each other—that they were good wives. They were out
there even on the mornings when their husbands were drinking and
hadn’t come home.

Their husbands are gone now, but the old women are
still there, before the paperboy, scolding the sidewalk and the bums
who use it, generating movement and heat to hold off the feeling of
waking up alone in a cold, empty house.

There are four of them left on this block of Chadwick
Street. Two of them are sisters, and this morning the older one steps
out of her door and looks at the cold half-dark sky over the roofline
of the buildings across the street, and then at her own breath,
coming through the scarf she has wrapped around her mouth to keep
from catching cold, and then, as she glances up the street in the
direction of her sister’s house, she senses something is out of
place.

She can’t say what at first; the street is quiet
and covered with frost. She moves her eyes back to the roofline
across the street, and then brings them down to her sister’s house
again, and now she sees something moving.

She crosses the street, being careful to pick her
feet straight up and down so as not to slip, and walks to a spot a
few feet away from the door that leads to Nick DiMaggio’s
gymnasium. The door has been splintered and hangs half off its
hinges, the top half moving in the breeze coming from the south.
Knifelike pieces of it lie inside on the steps, some of them covered
by the body of the old man she has seen coming in and out of the
place for months.

She stands still and stares at him, feeling her
breath against the scarf. He is not a bad-looking man, although he
needs a haircut. She thinks he must have fallen down the stairs.

She crosses the street again and knocks on her
sister’s door, wishing that she’d invited the old man in for
coffee, that she’d known who he was.

She hears the locks opening on the other side—three
of them—and the door opens.

"Something’s
happened," she says. "We better call Nicky."

* * *

N
ick is standing just
outside the door when the police come. The old woman who called him
is holding one of his arms.

"He must have fallen," she says.

The police get out of their car and stop even with
Nick. Urban Matthews is lying with his head in the stairwell, a
furious look on his face. One of his eyes is open, the other is
missing from the socket. An arm lies across his body, broken in two
directions under the shirt.

One of the cops is named Fowler, and he and Nick have
known each other a long time. He looks at Nick and waits. "So?"

Nick shakes his head. "Just somebody that needed
a place to stay for a while," he says.

The cop smiles. "Another fighter," he says.

Nick shakes his head. "No," he says, "he
wasn’t no fighter."

It is quiet a moment while they stare at the man at
the bottom of the stairs, the strange, uncomfortable angles his body
had taken and held. Nick would like to fix his head for him, to
straighten it with his neck.

Another police car arrives, and two men in uniforms
get out and begin roping off the front of the garage.

"He was quite a smart-looking man, wasn’t he?"
the old woman says. Nick feels the weight of her hand on his arm. He
tries gently to pull himself away—instinctively, he wants his hands
free—but she holds on, his jacket bunching under her fingers.

"He seemed to keep himself clean," she
says. "He could use a haircut once in a while, but he always
seemed very clean." Nick gets himself loose and goes upstairs
with the cop named Fowler. The old man’s mat is laid out flat on
the floor, the shirt that he stuffed with dirty clothes and used as a
pillow still holds the impression of his head.

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.

* * *

I
n 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.
 

PART THREE

1972

P
eter 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.