Orphan Pirates of the Spanish Main (2 page)

I'm no different, except I prefer the city and one dog at a time. My current situation's somewhat complicated. Technically, I'm married to Katyana, a woman half my age, but that's mostly a means to get her on my health insurance and give them some financial stability, her and her son Dylan, legally my son as well, though biologically not. They don't make you prove it at the hospital, turns out. All you have to do is step up and take credit. Nothing's cross-referenced, or they might've noticed I had a vasectomy a few decades back and a sex-ending prostatectomy five years ago. Katyana comes with a dog as well, Avatar, a stunning blue-gray standard poodle my intense little border collie Myrna adores with embarrassing intensity. They were both already too damn smart for dogs individually. Now they collude.

My brother doesn't approve of my recent marriage. Par for the course. My brother and I don't talk much these days, so I know it's important when he calls me. He's seventy-one.

Not a lot of good news peaks then, unless you want to talk religion, which I probably shouldn't, but I will. You can't expect an old man to stay on the subject—or, rather, the subject is larger than it might first appear. Aliens have a hard time with religion. Earthbound religions seem puny in the face of the cosmos. Dad again. The orphanage was Catholic. We most definitely weren't. Dad once told me he had wanted to be a priest when he was a kid until he figured out a few things—no details, though I could imagine. He wasn't anything in particular, but there was a resolute certainty that he was no longer Catholic. Mom picked the church. Mom liked the idea of church. She wasn't picky about doctrinal issues. Dad only went if Mom insisted, for whatever reason.

The only time he was enthusiastic about church besides weddings was when there was a stand-in minister one summer when we still lived in Texas who was eighty if he was a day, a wrinkled, liver-spotted old man with wild white hair and a voice that didn't sound like a preacher's but quiet and reedy and endlessly fascinated with the stories he told and the people he told them about. He had just retired from a life of missionary service in Africa. There was plenty of Bible in the sermons, as I recall, but he always came back to Africa, where people lived whole other lives like nothing we could imagine in Irving, Texas. He was terrific. I remember once he told the story of a refugee, though at the time I didn't know what that was, but I remember he only had one leg, and he was trying to find his mother, and he came to the minister and asked if Jesus could help him. When I looked over at Dad, there were tears on his face. Mom was wet-faced too, and smiling, happy because Dad was going to church. More than she wanted to go herself, I think, she wanted Dad to find a way to make it up with God. But the summer ended.

Dad went only once to hear the new, permanent minister—tedious and doctrinaire. Dad cursed him on the drive home, though he took us to breakfast, and we all gorged. I can't remember the minister's name, but I can still see his face. He was not a happy man. He was my first serious dose of Calvinist Sin, which only plunged me deeper into boyhood pantheism, for which I suppose I should thank him. To this day it remains my one true religion.

Ollie and I both have had our spasms of religious fervor of one sort or another, but we've ended up in the same place. Sunday mornings, we'd both rather be home in our kitchens, cooking. I'm making vegan, no-fat zucchini muffins. Later, Katyana and I plan to take Dylan and the dogs down to the James River, our sanctuary. I confess to being a very happy man.

That's when Ollie calls. “Stan,” he finally confesses after beating around every right-wing bush he can flail in an accent that still sounds like Irving, Texas more than a half-century later in a vain attempt to sucker me into a fight so one of us can hang up like we usually do: “I can't cook anymore. I lost my sense of smell.”

I suppose I should explain that's how we both cook. It's the alien way, the way we were taught. If you don't like spicy food, don't even drive by our houses. We never use recipes, but we can sniff them out from a tasty restaurant dish, recreate them at home—without the salt, fat, and sugar in my case. I'm on a project to unclog my abused arteries. Ollie still has his addictions.

“You can't smell anything? Have you been to the doctor?”

“I can still smell. The dogs still stink, the fucking compost next door. I just have no sense for it anymore, no confidence. I stood over a soup the other night with whole allspice berries, no idea how many to put in or none at all. It felt awful. One minute I had the idea of exactly how I wanted it to taste, you know? Next minute, gone. The soup was bland and disappointing. Camille pretended to like it, but I could tell. She said maybe I should write things down, use a recipe. The evening went downhill from there.”

Camille's new. I'm sure he wants to impress her. I can imagine how he feels. I don't get to say that often about my brother, so I nurse the feeling, try to get caught up in his crisis, help him struggle to overcome it. Rescuing my big brother was a major fantasy when I was ten, when I wasn't drowning him in a vat of snake venom. My heart goes out to him.

“Why couldn't we have normal parents like everyone else?” he says bitterly and torpedoes my sympathy.

Why does he have to blame everything on Mom and Dad? “Go to McDonald's, Ollie. There's probably a McDad on the menu, with cheese. A fried McMom.”

“I've asked you not to call me that.”

“Right. Oliver. Dad has nothing to do with your fucking nose, Ol-i-ver, so why don't you put a lid on it for a change? Have you tried a neti pot?”

“A
what?
”

I imagine explaining sinus irrigation as an ancient and effective Indian treatment to my brother, followed by his near-certain sneering dismissal, and spare myself the aggravation. “Why don't you come for a visit and we can work it out,” I hear myself saying in stunned disbelief. “You've never been.” It's true. I've been down to Florida three times since he's moved there, and he's never come to see me in Richmond.

Is that what I really want?
I ask myself, and I try to remind Ollie of what he's getting himself into. “You can meet Katyana and Dylan.”

I'm trying to scare him off, but it's too little, too late. Bad life choices his little brother's made to disapprove of? What's not to like about that? He's touched by my offer.

He accepts.

What have I done?

“Bring Camille,” I think to say, but he gives one of his mysterious guttural chuckles I'm supposed to understand because I'm his little brother.

“Just me,” he says. “Is this a good time?”

I've come to believe all times are good times, each moment wondrous. Everything happens when it should. Even me and my big mouth. “It's perfect.”

*   *   *

I recount it all to Katyana, and she thinks it will be delightful. She's the only one. What possessed me to want to help my brother? I'm certainly not his keeper. Not that we both don't need one. Our parents were strange, out of step with their culture, and maybe they didn't prepare us for life in the real world, but I've made my peace with them. I've tried to explain to Ollie that Mom and Dad were aliens whose parenting styles were somewhat unconventional for humans of the time, but he's having none of it. Too bad. It would be a comfort, but he doesn't need any grief from me. If he's coming to see me, he must be at the end of the last fiber of his rope. Shit. He must be in fucking free fall.

*   *   *

We all meet him at the airport—Katyana wants Dylan to experience the airport. We're a joyful little family unit, Dylan at his giggly-gurgly best, when I spot Ollie coming down the glass hallway, and my fears are confirmed. Something's seriously wrong. He's nice, sweet even. Katyana's gorgeous, and Dylan adorable, but this is my brother we're talking about. He doesn't even give me that look I've come to expect from any male who meets her and discovers we're married. He cradles Dylan in his arms and smiles at me with poignant envy. Is this really my brother?

There's an election looming, nasty inflammatory billboards everywhere. No matter which side you're on, it's loathsome to live in a battleground state. Ollie stares past the shrill slogans at the trees. We even go through a roundabout on the way home, a virulent passion of my brother's for some reason, and he says not a word, just gazes forlornly at the lovely Richmond architecture, looking like he might start crying any minute. Maybe he's remembering when he used to live here, when Mom and Dad were still alive. He shows a spark of life when he comes inside the house and the dogs are all over him—we both like most dogs better than we like most people—but something's weighing on him. This cooking business is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm thinking the worst, some horrible wasting disease. Guilt geysers up inside of me. I haven't been the best brother in the world, and now he has weeks to live. I feel awful.

He doesn't care. It's not about me. When I get him alone, he confesses that he and Camille are separated, that she said she couldn't stand to live with a seventy-one-year-old man who still has serious issues with his parents when they've been dead for more than forty years. She said some things that weren't very nice, made all the worse because they were true. Ollie's a mess.

“Issues? She says ‘issues'?” She's a semi-retired counselor, though I'm not sure who or what she counsels about.

He nods, snuffles. “She's right,” he says.

Maybe she is, but she doesn't have to say
issues.
Makes him sound like a client. He just needs to open his eyes and see. Ollie seems to have no idea what a gift it is to have had exceptional parents. Mom was an artist, though she never tried to sell anything, painting hollowed-out eggs, neckties, paint-by number landscapes with the palette changed so as to depict a scene from her home planet—never anything ordinary and mundane, no big-eyed girls or forlorn clowns. She made sculptures out of trash before everybody was doing that. The house always smelled like one glue or another. She threw herself into mosaics for a while. You never saw her without this tool, like pliers with jaws, that she used to snip the tiles. The sound drove the dog crazy—I guess it reminded her of having her nails cut—so when Mom had completely covered the kitchen counter, she abandoned mosaics so Natasha would come out from under my bed.

The mosaic was a city with domes and minarets and obelisks and ziggurats. Mom told me what they were when I asked. There was a lot going on. When you looked real close, some little chip of tile up along the roofline looked like a cat, or there were shadowy faces looking out the windows. She made it without a picture or plan or anything. Just snip, snip, snip, gluing down these pieces until she was done. I asked her if it was a real place, and she said, “Not anymore. It's how I remember it.” The next thing she said was something like “Don't you have homework?”

“I have to go,” Ollie says to me now. “We both have to go. To the abyss.” The abyss is where Mom and Dad's earthly lives ended.

No, we don't, but I have to say I'm intrigued. This isn't like him. I figured Ollie gave up on bold symbolic journeys a long time ago. I tried going to the abyss and didn't make it, thank goodness. Once is enough for me. “All this because of a few allspice berries, an overly cautious soup? What's going on, Ollie? Oliver. I don't see the connection.”

“I received a message.”

“A message?”

“From Mom.”

Before I can tell him he's nuts, he hands me a postcard. On one side is a photo of a sand painting I've seen before. On the other is a map of a portion of New Mexico with the abyss marked with a red X. “Your Father Needs You!” is written in Mom's loopy cursive. It's postmarked Tucumcari, ten days ago.

Mom's last artistic obsession, in the months before she and Dad took off for a vacation in the southwest, was a sand painting. Like the Navajo, she explained. She spent weeks just assembling the jars of different color sand. Dad would bring jars home from his travels. It took her a day and a night to sift the thing onto the garage floor, grain by grain, until it took up the whole garage. I was home for the summer, just out of college. Ollie had his own place, just out of the military. He'd come over for dinner to celebrate our birthdays, a few days apart.

After dinner, Mom had us take off our shoes and told us to walk out in the middle of the sand painting, me and Ollie both, but Ollie refused. Mom got pretty upset. Couldn't he do this one small thing for her? What did it matter
why?
While they continued to argue, I walked out into the middle of it like she asked, messing up the perfectly precise design as little as possible. It was sort of Navajo, I guess, with these long spindly guys standing like a chorus line, but their eyes were big almond eyes, and they had multi-colored angel wings. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

She had me sit in the middle of it at the feet of the spindly-legged angels, while Ollie wouldn't shut up about how stupid it was to make something like this and then just screw it up, that she needed help, that there were therapies, new drugs and treatments, but Mom ignored him and spoke to only me if he wouldn't listen, as if he weren't there: “Don't let them change you. Don't let them define you. Don't let them diminish the things you love. They don't mean to, but they will if you let them.” She said some other things on the same theme I don't remember exactly. Ollie never listened. For years I wondered who “they” were. I've come to realize she meant humans.

Dad called us inside for dessert while Mom vacuumed up the sand painting with a Shop-Vac.

A week later they were gone, plunged into the abyss, an obscure site in New Mexico Mom just had to see. They had been planning this trip even longer than she'd been collecting grains of sand. Some say they didn't die, that they were headed home. I guess I'm one.