Brotherly Love (26 page)

"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 Michael
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.

* * *

J
immy 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.

* * *

H
e 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.

* * *

T
hey 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.

* * *

I
t 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.