Corky's Brother (28 page)

“You wanna come with me to see Mel?” Corky asked when we were outside.

“Mel?”

“Come on—” he said. “You don't got to look at me like that—I didn't bust my wig. I mean at the funeral parlor.
I
wanna see him by myself once—before the others.”

“You know which place he's at?”

Corky nodded and turned up Rogers Avenue. I stayed next to him. At the corner of Rogers and Church, in the London Hut, the bus drivers were sitting, drinking coffee. “Sure
I
know where he is,” Corky said. “My old man ain't been talking about anything but the funeral since last spring. He said he had to get my old lady
ready
for it. Bastard—” We walked up Church Avenue, toward Flatbush, past Holy Cross Church. “The way he kept talking, you could tell he was glad Mel was gonna die.”

“Come on, Corky,” I said. “Your dad may be a louse, but I'm sure he didn't
want
Mel to die—”

“No?” Corky sneered. “You don't know my old man. He's got something twisted in him—ever since he had to leave the farm. Something happened then.”

“What?”

Corky shrugged. “I don't remember. I was too young. But something happened with him and my uncle—that was Sarah Jean's father—they ran the place together. There was fighting going on all the time, about money. That Sarah Jean's mother—she's a real bitch. My old man almost killed her once, went after her with an ax—I swear to God! I remember that. Me and Sarah Jean, we were playing in the barn when he took after her—we hid back of the bin of horseshoes. Sarah Jean's old man hadn't come, he would of chopped her head off. You should of seen him swinging that ax over his head—the horses, they were stamping like mad—I still remember that. I expected one of them to rear up and kill 'em both.”

“Why'd he do it?” I asked.

Corky shrugged, “I don't know—she was a bitch, that's all. I told you. She was always bugging him.” He laughed real loud. He seemed happy again. “He could of chopped her head off in one swipe too! You seen the power he has before, when he slugged me. On the farm he could beat any of the hands at tests of strength—he was always arm-wrestling somebody. The only guy who ever stood up to him was Mel.” Corky shook his head emphatically. “Mel never took any shit from that bastard.”

We were almost at the funeral parlor, and Corky pointed it out to me. He hitched up his pants, set his jaw, and a minute later we'd walked through the door. The man there looked at us strangely. “What do you boys want?” he asked. The room was lit with a pale amber light. In the next room I could see a coffin, the top open. There were flowers all around it, and the inside was lined with fancy silk.

‘Is my brother ready?” Corky asked.

The guy looked at Corky. “Your brother?”

“Mel—Mel Williams.”

“Melvin Williams,” the man repeated. His hair looked as if it had been drenched in oil. “Yes,” he said to himself. “Now I have it. The young man who…”

“Cut the jazz,” Corky said. “I wanna see my brother. Is he ready?”

The guy started apologizing to Corky in a Holy Joe tone about not having greeted us in a nicer way. “But we do have some young toughs who sometimes come in here at night and—”

“Come on, come on,” Corky said. He was rubbing his palms furiously with his fingertips and for a second I could see him losing his temper and slugging the funeral guy.

“Let me check,” the man said. He left us and Corky cursed. “Greasy bastard. He better not touch my brother—” The man returned after a minute and said that the “final preparations” would not be completed until the morning. “You sure?” Corky said.

“Yes,” the man said. He started to offer his condolences, but Corky didn't want them. The way his eyes were darting, and the way he kept shifting his feet and playing with his hands I think I must have been scared that Corky was not only going to slug him but was going to drag me down to the basement with him to look for Mel. I had this mad picture in my head of us pulling corpses out of these huge refrigerators, and the thought of the naked bodies, all fleshy and pink, made my stomach turn. I tasted some of the stuff from the party in my mouth, but I forced it back down.

“What time?” Corky asked.

“The family viewing is scheduled for ten o'clock,” the man said.

“Will he be ready before that?”

The man thought for a second. “Well, I imagine the preparations will be completed by our staff sometime before that, but, as I said—”

“I'll be here at nine,” Corky said. “You better be open. Come on, Howie.”

We walked around a lot after that, and at about two or three in the morning we wound up at my house. My father was a restless sleeper and he got up when he heard us come in. I think he was going to give me hell for coming in so late, but when he saw Corky he changed his mind. He told him how sorry he was to hear about Mel, and Corky mumbled back a reply.

“Can he stay here for the night?” I asked.

My father hesitated. “Do your folks know?” he asked.

Corky started to say something but I interrupted him and I surprised myself at how I could raise my voice to my father. “Jesus,” I said. “You're not gonna be like that, are you? What's the difference? If you don't want him to stay here, just say so. Yes or no—”

My father looked at Corky, then at me, then back at Corky. “Don't wake your brother and sister,” he said. “You want me to get you up in the morning?”

“I got to be at the funeral parlor at nine,” Corky said.

My father promised he would wake us at eight and then he said good night and told us not to stay up too late talking. I was proud of him. “He doesn't even need an alarm clock,” I explained to Corky later. “It's like he's got one built into his head—he can wake up any time he wants—on the dot.”

I loaned Corky a pair of my pajamas and we got undressed. When I'd opened my hi-riser, Corky lay on his back in the bed next to me, smoking. He cursed a few times and he seemed to be thinking about a lot of things. He thanked me for sticking with him and letting him sleep over, but I told him to shut up. Then he turned on his side and smiled at me.

“Bet I know what you're thinking,” he said.

“What?”

“Bet you're wondering if your girlfriend's coming up from Pennsylvania. I'll bet you can't wait.”

“Ah, come on, Corky—I never even met the girl. I mean—”

He laughed and punched me in the arm. “Wait till you closed I could feel his eyeballs staring through the lids, each one pointing in a different direction. Corky walked fast when we left and I had to skip once in a while to keep up with him. “Bastards,” he kept muttering. “Goddamn bastards.” He seemed so mean and angry I was scared that when he got home he would really kill somebody. I'd never seen him as angry as he was then, and when he kept repeating the word “bastards” I couldn't tell who he was referring to.

As soon as he walked through the door of his home, though, and saw all his relatives sitting around the table eating breakfast, the anger left. He got the way he did at parties—self-conscious and unsure of himself. He went around the room shaking hands with everybody and being kissed by all the women, and he hardly said anything. He just kept jerking his head forward the way a very shy guy does when he's introduced to somebody, and mumbling hello's. He shoved his hands in and out of his pockets and he didn't seem to be able to look anybody in the eye. He made the rounds of the room, staring at the floor most of the time, and then came back and stood by me.

When Corky's mother introduced me, saying I was Corky's best friend and that I'd stayed with him since the news had come, I felt uncomfortable, like an intruder. Everybody said hello, but when they stared at me I felt they were looking at me as if
I
was the one who'd been responsible for Mel's death. There must have been twenty to thirty of them in that small living room—about half of them sitting at the table drinking coffee, and the rest sitting in chairs, as quiet as Corky's father. Some of the women dabbed at their eyes with handkerchiefs once in a while, and Rhoda and a few of the neighbors walked around in the silence asking if people had enough coffee.

“They got here about an hour ago,” Corky's mother said to us. “They drove all night to be here—” She started to say something else, but began crying instead. A big woman—one of Corky's aunts—went to her and put her arm around her shoulder. Everybody else ate in silence. That got me, I remember—the idea of twenty or thirty people driving in a caravan of cars through the night on empty highways from these farms I'd never seen. I was certain they hadn't spoken, either. Just stayed awake looking at the road and waiting for the sun to come up.

When Corky's mother had gotten control of herself she asked some of the people about how other relatives and friends were—and then things settled down with everybody talking about who'd married and who'd had children and who'd been hit by disaster or by good fortune. They weren't quiet after that. Even Corky's father talked a lot—asking questions about the farm—and it really impressed me, how much all the men knew about animals and farming and machines. I suppose it was because they came from a world I didn't know anything about, but there was something about them—not just the way they clipped their sentences short or the old-fashioned way they dressed, with double-breasted suits and wide ties, but something else that made me envy them, that made me think that they were wiser than men like
my
uncles, who were all in businesses.

In the middle of all the talk a girl came out of Corky's room and I knew right away it was Sarah Jean. She was dressed in a plain wine-colored shirtwaist dress—and her blond hair was cut short, in bangs straight across her forehead. She was much prettier than her picture—it was almost as if she were the only person in the room who had any light coming from her face—yet she hardly seemed to be there. When she walked around the table and came to us, nobody even turned to look at her. She did it so silently it was as if she had air cushions under her feet. She just seemed to glide across the room, her whole body moving together, not emphasizing any one part, and I couldn't take my eyes off her or stop my heart from pounding. She drifted in between me and Corky and reached up on her toes slightly and kissed him on the cheek. “I'm sorry, Corky,” she said. “I liked Mel real well.”

She stayed next to us while the conversation went on around the room, and the whole time she held Corky's hand. I kept glancing at her and I couldn't figure out how old she was. Even though her hair was cut short and she didn't have any make-up on, there was something in the way her body relaxed, in the way she was able to stand there without fidgeting, that made her seem much older than the girls her age I went to school with. Her arm touched mine above the elbow—her skin was cool and soft—but she didn't seem to be aware of it, and I didn't move away. I kept glancing at her and getting more and more nervous.

Finally, Corky remembered that I was there. “This is Howie,” he said. “I stayed over his house last night.”

Sarah Jean nodded to me. “You meet my mother yet?” she asked.

“Your who—?” I replied—or something like that. I was so flustered by the way she looked straight at me that I didn't know what to say. Corky's face seemed to relax when he saw what was happening to me.

“That's her over there,” Sarah Jean said, motioning to a tall woman who was collecting dishes from the table.

“Hey,” Corky said, leaning his head in front of us and pushing his hair out of his eyes. “Did Howie tell you about how he's been telling everybody you're his girlfriend—?”

“Come on,” I objected. “You're the one—”

Then Corky laughed and explained to Sarah Jean about showing her picture. She smiled, and looked at me without blinking. Her eyes were a kind of olive-green color and I couldn't get over how pretty they were, at how they seemed to go with the rest of her face. Her hair was almost white in spots from having been bleached by the sun, yet her skin, even though it was smooth and brown, had a kind of deep red flush to it, mostly in her cheeks and around her eyes. “You're real nice-looking,” she said to me, her eyes fixed on mine. She said it as if it were a fact. Corky laughed and kidded me about blushing. “I got thin skin,” I said.

“My Ma's looking at us,” Sarah Jean said. I looked at Sarah Jean's mother standing across the room, and the look she gave me made me gulp. “Hold my hand, Howie,” Sarah Jean said, and she slipped her hand into mine. “I know what she's thinking,” she whispered to us, and I looked at her mother. She gave me such a stern look, I recall—as if holy fire were going to erupt from her eyes—that I started to take my hand from Sarah Jean's. With the gentlest pressure on my palm from her fingertips she made me keep it there. “I know what she's thinking,” Sarah Jean said again, and her cheeks glowed more than ever. “I don't care, though. You just hold on to my hand, Howie, and don't be scared. She can't do nothing to us.”

So I stood there holding Sarah Jean's hand. Her eyes were shining now, and while we stood there and everybody talked, she hummed along in this pretty voice, thin and pale. Then Corky's father said that it was time, that the funeral car was outside.

Downstairs, we got into the back of a Cadillac limousine along with Corky's parents and Rhoda, and on the way to the funeral parlor I looked out the windows, wondering if anybody I knew was going to see me riding with Corky's family.

“I saw him already,” Corky whispered, low enough so that only Sarah Jean and I could hear. “It don't look like him at all. Howie and I went to the place this morning. The bastards got him all fixed up like a square—you may not recognize him in this suit and tie and stuff.”