The Legend of the Ditto Twins (11 page)

"Clark?"

"Dad,
don't say, 'This is all for the best.'"

Our
father winced. "I just thought maybe you'd like to come along for the ride
tomorrow"

"I
wish you would," I murmured.

Clark
shook his head. "I couldn't handle it. No, we'll say our good-byes tonight."

I wanted
to go to him, comfort him, but at that precise second, Mom sailed into the
room, clearly re-energized. Humming softly.
Humming!
That's
when it hit me. We may have won the battle, but she'd won the war. She'd
managed to separate us for the first time in our lives.

She
cooked up her fried chicken for supper and spent the entire meal prattling on,
trying to convince us (and herself) that the summer promised great opportunity
for all concerned. Every time we asked her to talk about Uncle Clay, though,
she detoured with a description of his house (the family homestead where they'd
grown up), his business (where she'd met my
father the day he came in to buy a
muffler), and the city to which I was being exiled (too close to that toddling
town of Chicago to suit her).

Finally, I put down my fork.
"Why won't you tell us about Clay? At least tell me. I'm the one who's
gonna have to go live with him. I can't even remember what he looks like."

"Of course you do. He's a
very handsome man. Always was. Of course, that was his curse."

"Curse?" Clark and I
both looked up from our plates.

"His looks. His charm.
Everyone was in love with him. I know I was—well, not in that way—after all, he
was my brother." She blushed and quickly moved on. "The problem was that
he had no willpower, if you know what I mean."

"No. What..."

"...do you mean?"

"Oh, come on now. You ask us
to treat you like adults." Leaning forward, he barely mouthed the words.
"He couldn't keep his zipper zipped." That said, she gnawed clean an
entire ear of sweet corn before she continued. "He's calmer now. Not so
wild. Otherwise I would never have agreed to let you go." She nodded to
assure herself. "Yes, not wild at all. A heart attack'll do that to
you." She took my hand. "Mark, you do realize: this is privileged
information. I'm only telling you these things on a need-to-know basis. I just
want you to be on your guard in case he starts bringing his wild women into the
house again. If that happens, you call me the minute the rates change."

My brother and I didn't say much
as we packed my stuff for the trip. We'd never divided things up before. Still,
there were no arguments about what clothing stayed, what went. One T-shirt was
little different from another, one pair of jeans like the next. We even wore
the same size sneakers. Clark wanted to keep the ashtray pair.

"Are you ever gonna let me
read our memoirs?" he asked.

"Sure."
I
produced the notebooks
I'd
been working on for the last two
years. "You keep em here. Only don't show em to anyone else."

He nodded. I stuffed one carton of
Marlboros in my backpack; Clark hid his in our Boy Scout gear at the back of
the closet. I divided the throwaway razors that were left, and he put his
(along with one can of Burma Shave) in the medicine cabinet. I buried mine in
my backpack.

"You want to take this?" he
asked, holding up the remains of our current jar of Vaseline.

I tried to smile. "Not unless
you go with it."

"I'll save it for your
homecoming."

"Not for tonight?"

He shrugged.
"I
'm not really in the mood right now."

"Good. Me either."

"Weird."

"Weird."

I glanced down at our clock-radio,
surprised by the time. "Funny. I thought by now we'd have at least two
rounds under our belts already."

Clark shook his head. "It's not
a game anymore."

"Nope. It's a lot more than
that, isn't it?"

He nodded. "Tonight I just want
us to hold each other..."

“...as close as we can."

Clark nodded. Moments later, we were
both naked.

"Do you suppose we should say
our prayers?" my brother asked. "We haven't..."

“...for a long time, I know. Only can
we..."

“...skip the dull parts? Sure."
He moved closer and ran a fingertip over my shaved upper lip. "God bless
Mark."

I responded in kind. "God bless
Clark."

And then we kissed.

It was the first of many kisses that
night. Our tongues explored each other's flesh in a sort of languorous slow
motion until, maybe an hour later, we found ourselves in what we later found
out was called the sixty-nine position. My head was lying on his inner thigh,
his on mine, but
the curious thing, in retrospect,
was that neither of us was even slightly tumescent. Without discussion, we
kissed each other’s cockhead goodnight and began to doze off. To this day, I've
not been able to figure out why it never occurred to either of us to suck cock
that night.

"You read it all?" Mark
asked.

Clark nodded. "While you
were asleep. Its good. I'd give it an A, maybe an A-plus, if you had to do it
for class—only you can't. You've got to burn it."

"Burn it?"

"Yeah, burn it. I mean, what
if someone read it? Like Mom. Shit, can you imagine what she'd do if she read
it?"

"I never thought of that. I
just..."

"Well, you can't leave it
here?"

"Okay, then I'll take it
with me to Uncle Clay's."

"You're gonna keep
writing?" he asked.

"Well, sure. Tell what
happens next. You know, like David Copperfield or King Arthur, kind of."

Well, then, promise me you'll
print in big letters across each notebook: Do Not Read Until After Our
Death."

They heard a horn honk. Mark
rushed to the window of their room and waved down to their father, who was
already waiting in his truck. He kissed his brother good-bye, gathered up his
things, and started for the door, afraid to look back, for fear he might not go
if he did. The last thing he heard Clark say was: "Do I really look like
an Olympic gold medal marathon man?"

A little after noon
the next day, my father pulled the pick-up into the driveway of an old
Victorian mansion that had seen better days. The lawn needed mowing, the house
a coat of paint, and the gingerbread latticework that framed the wrap-around
porch was badly in need of repair.

I climbed
out of our truck and retrieved my backpack and the two shopping bags in which
my things were packed. That was when I first saw Uncle Clay. Framed in the
front doorway, he was holding a videocam to his eye, filming my arrival. I
waved and took a good long look.

About my
height and weight, the same ice-blue eyes, the same golden hair, he cut a
striking figure. True, the eyes were a bit hollowed, the skin a bit pasty, and
his clothes hung a bit too loosely on him, but he was blood kin all right. No
doubt about it. All I could think was: This is what I'm going to look like in
forty years.

"Remember
me?" he called out by way of greeting.

"Sure,"
I lied and stuck out my hand. His firm grip was not the handshake of a man
who'd been at death's door for the last year and a half.

"I'd
help you with all that shit, but my fuckin' doctor says I'm not to lift a
fuckin thing for another three months. He's an asshole, but he charges a lot,
so I try to get my fuckin money's worth."

He laughed,
a warm, deep laugh, and I responded with one of my own. Here was a man who'd
used The F Word three times in the first two sentences out of his mouth, and
not one of them sounded profane. I liked him already.

He
ushered Dad and me into the house, which was a curious combi
nation of
pa
st and present. Faded velvet drapes framed the windows
of what once had been the parlor, I guess. On one wall were a huge flat-screen
television and an elaborate stereo system. In front of them, a yellow plastic
recliner had been squeezed in between a pair of overstuffed chairs that may
have been a hundred years old.

"This
is where we hang out," he said.

"'We'?"

"Lily
and me, my daughter. You've never met her, have you? She's at her fuckin'
aerobics class right now, but she said she'd pick up some take-out on her way
home. You eat Chinese?"

Dad and I
both nodded.

"Want
to see your room?"

"I've
seen it already," said Dad. "If you don't mind, I'll just lie down
and catch forty winks. I'm gonna try to drive back tonight."

"Sure.
Help yourself." Clay kept right on walking through a mahogany arch,
leaving Dad to fend for himself. "Good guy, your father. Lousy taste in
women, but I like him. Do you?"

Not
knowing what to say, I followed in silence down a long, dark hallway. He
pointed to a door and motioned me to open it. I set down my stuff and obeyed.
To my surprise, the room beyond glowed with warm afternoon sunlight. It was
twice as big as our bedroom back home, and against one wall stood a huge
four-poster bed covered with a painted black velvet throw depicting The Rolling
Stones in concert.

Clay
patted the bed. "Big enough for two. More if that's your scene." His
rich, rollicking laugh echoed through the room as I tried my damnedest to be
cool. "Lily's queer for The Stones," he explained, segueing without
taking a breath. "I figure
Clark'll
be wanting
to come visit you sometime soon, yes?"

"Is
that all right?"

"Doofus!
Why wouldn't it be? He's your fuckin' brother. You know, I tried my damnedest
to hire you both for the summer, but your mom had some wild hair up her
ass—wouldn't hear of it. All over a lousy fuckin jar of Vaseline."

I felt as
though I'd just been kicked in the balls. Searching for breath, I sank onto the
foot of the bed. "I guess you know a lot more about us than we do about
you."

"I
bet I do." Another wicked laugh. "So? Ask me any fuckin thing you
want. I have very few secrets left. Go ahead. Ask me. Twin to twin."

I must
have done an awful double-take because he laughed again. "You didn't
know?"

Wide-eyed,
I shook my head.

"Oh,
yeah. I'm a twin, too. Runs in the family."

I could
barely get my words out. "Mom never told us."