The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (25 page)

After a while we noticed the time and agreed Scott had been delayed. It didn’t take more than forty-five minutes or so to drive to the liquor store and back, even in this weather.

“Maybe he’s dead or injured,” I said wistfully.

“Unkraut vergeht nicht,”
my mother sighed, as ever, whereupon the phone rang. We knew it was Scott. I think we even knew why. This had been going on for almost a quarter of a century, after all.

Sure enough he’d wrecked his car.

“How bad is it?” my mother asked, and by the way she winced I knew Scott’s reply had been abusive. It was bad; the poor old car was history. The word “fuck” squawked out of the receiver at intervals. My mother went on questioning him with a sort of meek Socratic irony.

“Whose fault is it? . . . Are you okay? . . . Are the police there? . . . Are you drunk?”

Alas, he was sober more or less, and the liquor he’d bought at the store was still unopened, which meant he wouldn’t be arrested on the spot. In fact he’d only gotten a ticket for reckless driving, and what’s more the obliging policemen were going to bring him back to us safe and sound.

ALL TOO SHORTLY
thereafter, Scott banged through the door lugging a large plastic storage bin he’d kept in the trunk of his BMW—an essential item from the days when he’d lived out of his car. But his car was no more. What was left was the bin, which clanked and tinkled as he laid it heavily on the kitchen floor. It was full of clothes and the bottles he’d bought at the liquor store. Brazenly he uncapped a liter of Jim Beam and took a lavish swig.
“Ahhh!”
he said, and belched.

“Scott, you can’t drink that in here!”

My mother.

“Yeah, Scott,” I said, “drink it
outside
.”

Nobody laughed. With one bloodshot eye on both of us, he took another swig and belched again. I thought of the time twenty years ago when my father had brought him back, bandanna and all, from the police station. Here was the same swollen face, the same pathetic swagger, the same defiant self-pity vis-à-vis a world that refused to cut him a break.

My mother took a different tack. With a sort of censure-free eagerness, she asked my brother to explain, in detail, what had happened exactly, as though he were a famous raconteur and we were his audience, all agog.

“What the fuck difference does it make?” he said, but with a little coaxing he admitted that the motorist in front of him had seen fit to stop at a yellow light, while he, Scott, had kept going. The fucking
ice
and so forth.

“Is he all right?” my mother asked.

Scott closed his eyes, stock-still with exquisite patience. “Who?”

“The man in the other car!”

Scott said the
woman
was fine, though he would have preferred to “maim the cunt.” He laughed at his own ugliness. Not for the first time he seemed intrigued by the duality of his own nature—that he could be a good Christian (as he still considered himself) on the one hand and say things like “maim the cunt” on the other. He added that he’d like to get all such cunts off the roads. For good.

“That would leave the roads to yourself,” I observed, “and people like yourself.”

Marlies, perhaps to distract him, pointed out that the woman had probably sustained some degree of whiplash and would almost certainly sue. She noted as much with a kind of ponderous objectivity. It was a very German thing to say: actions have consequences; if you suck your thumb the tailor will cut it off, etc. Scott let it be known that he didn’t give a fuck what either woman—my mother or the motorist—said or did.

Then they resumed wrangling over whether Scott had any right to drink liquor in my mother’s house. Scott’s position was that life was one fucking thing after another, and now he’d lost his car, a car that had served him faithfully for six years, and by God in light of all that he was going to get drunk tonight and nobody was going to stop him.

Made sense to me. “Look,” I said. “I’m going to the other room and watch TV. Scott, I don’t give a fuck if you drink yourself to
death
, but could you do it in your own room and quietly, please? And Ma. Give it a rest already. I mean really, who the fuck cares?”

Neither replied. They were waiting for me to leave. They still had a lot to say to each other, and I had no part in that conversation. I was an outsider; I didn’t grasp the principles at stake, and they weren’t going to explain them to me.

LATER I LAY
awake in the dark, an iron poker within reach under the couch. A faint light from my brother’s room was visible in the hall. Every half hour or so the following would occur: my mother would pad lightly through the living room, so not to wake me, and turn down the thermostat in the hall; my brother, drunk, kept turning it up to eighty or so. Then she’d open my brother’s door—quietly—and hiss at him to leave the thermostat alone and go to
sleep
already. Scott would remonstrate after a fashion. This would go on for maybe five minutes; then my mother would return to her room. Moments later Scott would turn up the thermostat again, the vents would roar, and my mother would pad lightly through the living room again.

At one point I distinctly heard my brother say, “You touch that thermostat again I’m gonna fuckin
kill
you.”

The tension must have overwhelmed me, because I fell asleep after that. My mother woke me in the morning. She was kneeling beside the couch.

“Now that his car’s gone he’ll never leave!” she said in a gaspy hysterical whisper. “You have to tell him to go! You have to get him out of here!”

I was struck by the contrast between her mad tenacity the night before—her refusal to relinquish the thermostat prerogative—and her utter helplessness now. She was done in. She was like the proverbial frog in the skillet that doesn’t jump because the heat is turned up slowly, slowly, until the frog dies.

“So what finally happened with the thermostat?” I asked.

She shot an anxious glance over her shoulder. Beckoned me into the hall. Scott’s door was slightly ajar. She pushed it aside—a chilly whiff of bourbon and body odor ensued—and there was Scott, naked, in a shivering fetal lump beside a floor vent. My mother had outlasted him
re
the thermostat, a Pyrrhic victory to be sure: he’d passed out before he could kill her. She closed the door and tugged me into the kitchen.

“What am I gonna
do
?” she asked.

I’d given this a lot of thought the night before, while I lay in the dark listening to the same argument (more or less: the thermostat was just the latest MacGuffin) they’d been having since Scott was thirteen or so. I reminded my mother that she was supposed to take me into town that day so I could rent a car and drive to Oklahoma City and see some friends; instead we’d go to the police station and arrange for Scott’s removal from the premises.

My mother looked doubtful. “You mean have him arrested?”

“Well, if that’s what it takes, sure.”

“No, sweetie.” She shook her head. “I can’t do that. It’s Christmas.”

“He threatened to kill you last night! He
will
kill you.” Her head was still wagging faintly, so I slung my bolt. “Think of your cats.”

About an hour later I heard Scott stirring and caught a glimpse of him as he slipped out the door and hurried into the bathroom. His face was set with a kind of petulant dignity; he was no longer naked. Rather he wore one of the ankle-length Wee Willie Winkie nightshirts he’d affected ever since his teen years—the bedtime equivalent of his trench coats and caps. He took a long shower, rushed back to his room with eyes averted (petulantly), and finally emerged wearing a respectable sweater and slacks. He took his place behind my mother in the kitchen and waited to be noticed; my mother went on chopping onions. At last he spoke with a fussy little clearing of his throat:

“I apologize for whatever
inconvenience
my behavior might have caused you last night. I suppose I was feeling, you know,
distressed
, given the fact that I’d lost the one possession that matters to me in the whole world, but I guess that’s no reason to, ah, to
inflict
my bad fortune on others. So I hope we can put this behind us and enjoy our Christmas.”

The speech—nine parts self-pity and one part sarcastic contrition—was not apt to move even the softest heart to forgiveness, and my mother was not moved. I did notice, however, a slight flicker of guilt around her mouth, but she visibly toughened as she considered her cats.

“What d’you want for breakfast?” she said in a neutral voice. Scott answered and seemed about to resume the speech, but my mother sighed in a let’s-just-forget-it sort of way, and Scott seemed glad enough to leave her. I received him in the manner of a bantering little bro’ in some suburban sitcom.

“Hey, Slick! How’s the morning head?”

Scott seemed relieved, if a bit warily so, and made some bantering reply. Somewhere in the midst of our bantering I noticed the poker peeking out from under the couch and pushed it out of sight with my foot.

Somehow we got through breakfast and finally, with the exhilaration of tunneling convicts, my mother and I made it out to the car. Scott was framed pensively in the doorway, watching us. As ever he’d wanted to come along.

“Don’t forget,” I said, as my mother drove carefully over the ice, “to mention the fact that he assaulted you.”

But she wouldn’t hear of it. She wanted to
help
Scott, she said; maybe the police could persuade him to get treatment. In any event she had no intention of saying anything that might get him arrested. She just wanted him out of her house, period. She went on like this all the way to the police station.

We had to wait in the lobby for a few minutes, and I used the time to cancel my lunch appointment with an old friend.

“Sorry, Chris,” I said, when his machine beeped, “but my brother Scott threatened to kill my mother last night so now we’re at the police station and it looks like it might take a while. Rain check? Well . . . wish me luck!”

Then we were sitting in a cubicle opposite a police officer, who asked Marlies a series of deadpan questions and jotted some notes.

“And you say he’s violent?”

“Well—he’s
potentially
violent. He drinks!”

The cop made note of this. “So he hasn’t actually done anything to you?”

“Can’t we just take him to the hospital?” my mother pleaded. “I want to
help
him. He needs
help
.”

“He’s violent,” I told the policeman. “He assaulted her and he’s capable of worse. A lot worse. Last night he threatened to kill her.”

“He did not!”

“He did too.”

“He was drunk!”

“Right. He drunkenly threatened to kill her, and he’s drunk most of the time. It’s like saying he was breathing at the time.” The cop mirthlessly jotted this down, and I mentioned a few other salient details. “He needs to be institutionalized,” I said. “A mental hospital would be nice, I guess, but we’ll settle for prison.”

“We will
not
!” said my mother.

The man put down his pencil. Arching his eyebrows as he scanned his notes, he advised us that the best they could do was remove Scott as a trespasser. They’d be happy to do this.

“Can’t you take him to a hospital?” my mother asked.

“With his consent, sure.”

I laughed. “What about some kind of restraining order?”

The cop replied that some kind of order—not exactly a “restraining order” per se, but some lesser equivalent—could be issued under the following conditions: if, having been removed as a trespasser, Scott were to come within a hundred feet of us and still be imminent and menacing by the time the police arrived, we could petition the court for an order; then, if he returned
again
after that, and was
again
willing to wait around for the police without maiming or killing us, he could at last be arrested.

“Sounds dicey,” I said.

The cop frowned in a noncommittal way. “So. Would you like him removed from your property?”

“Yes, please.”

WE RENDEZVOUSED WITH
a police car about a mile from my mother’s house. One of the cops was a burly guy in his fifties with a walrus mustache that seemed to capture the gravity of the situation. He explained what was about to go down. He assured my anxious mother that Scott wouldn’t be arrested or molested in any way as long as he didn’t resist. He advised us to stay in the background and let them handle it. His partner, a tense younger man, gave a sharp affirmative nod:
just so
.

Scott didn’t answer the door right away. I worried that he’d spotted the police car and bolted out a back window—waiting in the woods until the coast was clear to kill us—but then the door swung open and there was Scott. For a moment he registered faint surprise: his eyes narrowed and he cocked his head slightly; then, darting a glance at me, our mother, and back at the cops, he said:

“Won’t you come in, officers?”

When sober Scott understood that it didn’t pay to mince words with cops; this was one nugget of wisdom he’d culled from his dark sojourn. His voice was soft, concerned—
what could the trouble be?
—and when the tense cop asked him to step away from the door, Scott obliged with hasty composure. Then, with an almost comic diffidence—a mildly flustered butler—he invited the cops to follow him into the living room and have a seat. They remained standing. Scott asked if they minded whether
he
sat; they did not. Scott arranged himself in a chair, crossing his legs, and waited for the matter to be explained to him.

“Sir,” said the walrus mustache, “your mother would like you to leave her house.”

Scott gave our mother a wondering look:
surely not
.

“Scott, you need help,” she said. “You’re an alcoholic and you need help.”

“An ‘alcoholic’?” He slowly shook his head, as though he didn’t quite get the joke. “Because I got a little drunk last night, I’m suddenly an ‘alcoholic’ . . . ?”

I thought about interjecting a scornful laugh at that point, but decided to stand on my dignity. I sighed and gave the officers a vaguely pained look.