Brothers and Bones (10 page)

I carefully slipped out from behind Jessica. On the kitchen table I found my keys, then located some paper and a pen and left her a nice note, thanking her for always being there for me and telling her that I’d be as ready as I could be for the charity dinner in eighteen hours or so.

I left her place and drove my rust-bucket Corolla back to my apartment and found a parking spot only two blocks away. I entered the building, climbed three flights of stairs to my apartment, and unlocked the three deadbolts on my door. I went inside and relocked the door behind me.

I was tired, so I headed right to the bedroom. I’d left the window cracked and it had grown chilly in the room, so I went to close it. I looked down on Brimmer Street four stories below. And that’s when I saw the figure standing right across the street, staring up at me. It didn’t melt back into my imagination. It didn’t scurry off into a darkened doorway or dart behind a Dumpster. It stood there, just out of the reach of the light from the nearest streetlamp, a hulking shadow with its dark face tilted up. And even though I couldn’t see its eyes, I knew they were staring right at me.

I spun away from the window and stood with my back to the wall, breathing hard. Finally, after all these years, there was somebody there, really there. I knew I needed to find out who he was and what he wanted with me. I took a deep breath and looked back out the window. The figure was gone. Before I knew it, I was out the door and flying down the steps toward the street below, wincing nonstop as I bounded down, each step sending shock waves of pain through my damaged ribs.

I banged through the front doors and onto the sidewalk, clutching my sides and grimacing as I did. As I struggled to catch my breath, I scanned the sidewalks on both sides of the street. Gone. The son of a bitch was gone. Had he even been there or had I imagined him as I had imagined so many others over the years?

No! I saw him. I was sure of it this time, more sure than I’d ever been. I wanted to go right then to Dr. Fielding’s house in the suburbs, ring his doorbell, and punch him in his Freudian face.
Damn it, I really saw him this time, you quack
.

I wandered up and down my block for a few minutes in utter frustration, peering into every shadow and muttering to myself like the lunatic I might—or might not—have been fast becoming. When I satisfied myself that no one was hiding nearby, I went inside and tramped up the stairs.

My apartment door was as I’d left it, flung wide open. I closed it behind me, engaged all three deadbolts, and went into the kitchen for a beer, which I suddenly wanted badly. I grabbed a Bud from the fridge, then, thinking better of it, grabbed a second. I knew the first one wouldn’t last long enough to take the chill off the second before I needed it.

With a beer bottle in each hand I walked into the living room and headed for the couch. I didn’t make it.

“One of them for me, Wiley?” a gruff voice asked in a scratchy whisper.

I dropped both bottles. I was lucky I didn’t wet myself. Standing in the middle of the room was a man in a tattered overcoat, his wild tangle of hair obscuring his face, his matted beard hanging over his Harvard sweatshirt. I’d found my homeless man. Or rather, he’d found me.

I opened my mouth to speak, or to scream for help—I wasn’t sure which—and the homeless man lunged toward me with astonishing speed, covering the ten feet between us before I could back up even half a step. I tried to raise my arms in defense but, again, the man was far too quick. I barely saw him coming before he had spun me around, thrown an arm around my neck, and placed a forearm against the side of my head. The strength in his arms was incredible. I knew he could snap my neck with almost no effort. To my dismay, he confirmed this by pressing his scabby lips right against my ear and whispering, “I could kill you with no more than a twitch of my hand, Wiley. Don’t make a fucking sound, understand?” He lessened the pressure on my head just enough for me to nod.

For three days most of my mental energy and a great deal of physical effort had been directed toward finding this man. I’d been mugged by a homeless person and beaten by a pack of thugs. My work had taken a similar beating. All so I could find this man, whoever he was. Now, though, having finally found him, I began to wish I hadn’t looked quite so hard.

ELEVEN

“Remember, not a sound,” the homeless man breathed into my ear.

His grip was steel as he half pushed, half carried me toward the door, one arm locked around my neck, his other forearm pressed against my right temple. I struggled for breath. His warning was unnecessary. I couldn’t make a sound even if I’d wanted to.

When we reached the front door, he stuck those scaly lips into my ear again. “Unlock the door and open it.”

I did. Once we left the apartment, he removed the forearm from the side of my head and closed the door. I was no longer worried about him breaking my neck. Strangling seemed a much more likely death now.

“We’re going down,” he said in his gravelly voice. He didn’t whisper this time, but he spoke quietly. Then he let go of my neck and gave me a nudge toward the stairs. I wanted to turn around, but sensed it might not be a terrific idea.

He was silent as we descended and I thought about his voice. Did I recognize it at all under all that gravel? Hard to tell with him speaking barely above a whisper. He’d called me Wiley again. Twice. Was it possible? Could it be…Jake? I still hadn’t gotten a look at his face, either in my apartment just now or in the subway station two days ago. I’d never looked at it any of the other times I’d seen him before, either. But if it was Jake, why not just say so? Why run away from me in Chinatown? Why attack me upstairs just now, for that matter?

As we neared the bottom of the stairs, I wasn’t even sure I wanted this man to be Jake. I wanted my brother to be alive, of course, but would I have wanted him to have endured whatever could have turned him into the man in rags behind me, the man I had seen on the street mumbling incoherently at times, and loudly spouting gibberish at other times?

When we reached the small lobby, I headed for the door to the street, but the man grabbed me from behind again and held me tight. He leaned over my shoulder to look out through the window in the door and I caught a terrible whiff of the pungent odor that cloaked him. I tried to see his face but his hair hung in the way again, a curtain drawn across his features. Apparently deciding the coast was clear, he jerked the door open and shoved me through it—not gently, but not too roughly.

Once I hit the sidewalk, I began to turn to face him. He put a hand on my shoulder before I could do so and guided me toward the corner of my building, into a small, dark alley. A man lay on his side in a pile of discarded newspapers, apparently asleep. A homeless man, probably, though I thought he looked a little familiar. I might have seen him loitering near this alley before.

“Turn around,” the man behind me said, then he cleared his throat, snuffled, and spit.

I turned and looked up into his face, still unsure what I hoped to see. The alley was dark but I could see clearly enough.

He wasn’t Jake.

I was crushed flat.

Up to that point I wasn’t sure whether I wanted the man to be my brother. Now that I knew he wasn’t, the disappointment was like a kick in the stomach. In an instant, Jake—or at least the imminent possibility of him—was gone again and I was left with the black void in my chest, the depthless hole in my heart that I’d lived with for so long. The pain was like bone cancer.

Jake was gone.

But surely this man knew something about that. He scratched at his head, which caused the tangled hair to pull off his face. It was a dirty face—what showed above the long, dark beard—with a couple of open sores and a number of old scars. The nose, which I could see had once been straight and strong, had been broken at least one time, probably more than that. The eyes were rheumy and red. The man had probably been handsome once, but if so, it was long ago.

“How you doin’, Wiley?” he asked in his rough, gravelly voice. I doubted he needed to chew when he ate. All he had to do was swallow and let the rocks in his throat pulverize the food on its way down to his stomach. His lips cracked into something resembling a smile, exposing a set of teeth and gums straight out of Central Casting for a gingivitis warning poster. Then, inexplicably, he said the word “Bones.” It seemed so out of left field, such a non sequitur, that for a moment I couldn’t think of a thing to do or say. Then he stuck out his hand and I realized he had introduced himself. I hesitated only a moment before shaking his hand. The hand was callused and grimy, the fingers slightly gnarled, like several had been broken in the past and never properly set. But at least that hand had all its fingers. I recalled from the subway the other morning that his left hand, with which he was scratching his back, was missing its little finger.

“I’m Charlie,” I said.

He shook his head once. “Wiley.”

I decided not to argue about it. I had questions for him. He could call me Betty Boop if he wanted, as long as he told me what I needed to know.

“You been looking for me,” he said. It was a statement, not a question, but he was waiting for an answer. I nodded. “Why?”

I relaxed a little. He didn’t seem like he intended to hurt me, at least not right away. He, too, wanted answers. Still, I’d have felt better up in my cozy little apartment than down in that dark alley.

“Why don’t we go back upstairs and talk?” I said. “Have something to eat.” My mind raced. Did I have any food to give him? There was the leftover Chinese takeout. At first I worried about having only leftovers to offer, then I remembered once seeing him eat something out of a subway-station trash can. “Would that be okay?”

He took a long time to consider my offer. He looked confused. I realized he probably couldn’t remember the last time anyone had invited him into his or her home. He seemed tempted, but then he blinked hard, shook his head sharply, and the confused look was gone, like he’d physically shaken it from his face, replacing it with an intense scowl. It looked to me almost like, by shaking his head, he’d changed channels in his brain, causing his face to display a new station. He said, “Not inside. Shouldn’t have gone inside before. They probably listen inside.”

I smiled and nodded and wondered if that was how I sounded to Dr. Fielding. I had forgotten for a moment that this man’s train had jumped the tracks long ago. I became more resolved to get out of that alley, at least, try to get him to a public place.

“Well, can we go somewhere else then? I’ll buy you a sandwich. We can talk.”

He thought hard about it again. He gave his head another shake, but his face retained the scowl. “You mean, like, a restaurant? A diner? A place with a waitress? Something like that?”

I nodded and his scabby lips shifted into that smile-like configuration again.

TWELVE

Years on the street obviously hadn’t adversely affected my companion’s appetite. I’d offered to buy him a meal. I was now considering, however, whether I should look into taking out a small bank loan to pay the tab. He’d eaten a club sandwich, a bowl of beef barley soup, a mountain of French fries smothered in thick gravy, a bowl of chili, another sandwich—meat loaf this time—and was working on a piece of pie as I sipped my hot chocolate and nibbled at my bagel. I almost reached for a French fry at one point, but decided it might be a terrible idea to try to take away even a morsel of his food. He ate loudly, alternately emitting groans of pleasure and feral grunts. Food that dropped from his lips caught in his beard. When he wiped his fingers, he did so on his sleeves, ignoring the pile of paper napkins I set near him. We drew stares from the two other sets of patrons sharing two-a.m. meals. The manager of the place, a rotund man with a fleshy, porcine face, stood behind the counter glaring at me, condemning me with his piggy eyes for contaminating his place with the presence of my companion. I sent him an eye signal of my own in return, telling him to bite me. I hadn’t forgotten his making me show him that I had cash before he’d seat us.

As the man who called himself Bones ate, I watched him. He clutched his food with his nine slightly crooked fingers. When he raised his hands to his mouth, his sleeves slipped a little and I could just see old scars slashing across the exposed parts of his forearms. There were also what appeared to be numerous small, circular scars, like from cigarette burns. Every now and then he’d turn his head one way or the other and I could see similar marks on his neck behind his beard. I had a pretty good idea what I was looking at. When I was in law school I’d done an internship with a public-interest-law group focused on obtaining political asylum for worthy applicants. Some of the people seeking asylum brought photographs, evidence of what had been done to them by government officials in their home countries. I recognized the signs of torture, or at least I thought I did.

Bones caught me staring and I shifted my focus to his eyes. Several times as I watched him eat, he “changed channels,” as I’d come to think of it. At times his face was nearly blank as he jammed bits of food into his mouth. Then he’d give his head a violent shake or blink a few times, and he’d look angry—at me, at the table, at his spoon, at the world. Then another shake and he’d look disoriented, like he had no idea how he had suddenly ended up in a diner with his mouth full of lemon meringue pie. One time he stopped eating and stared at the stump on his left hand where his little finger used to be, looking confused, as if he wondered if he’d accidentally bitten off his pinky during the meal. A moment later, his eye twitched and he resumed eating. I watched him mentally channel surf as he stuffed himself, and I hoped he’d end up on a harmless station, maybe PBS, when he was finally ready to talk.

Soon, that moment arrived. He pushed the last of his plates aside, licked his fingers, and reached for his coffee cup. It was empty. I looked for the waitress, who wasn’t in sight, then signaled the manager. He frowned, waddled over, and dropped a small coffee carafe on our table, then took up his position again behind the counter, where he could glower at us in silence without Bones seeing him.