The God of War

by Marisa Silver

  I reached over and pulled The Gold and Gods of Peru from my shelf. A month earlier I found out through school gossip that Mrs. Poole’s son was in prison. Now my crime seemed pathetic. I was an accidental book thief. Mrs. Poole might have been the mother of a killer.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, I CARRIEDThe Gold and Gods of Peru to school, but when I approached Mrs. Poole’s desk, I could not bring myself to take it out of my army green backpack. She looked up at me expectantly. She wore an alert, somewhat wary expression caused, I thought, by children speaking too loudly and wrongly shelved books. Most of the children at school were careful around her. Her dark brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but one short strand had broken loose, and she repeatedly tucked it behind her ear as though something more private than a lock of hair had escaped confinement. Her cheeks were puffy at the bottom as if she were storing two caramels or some other secrets there. She dressed in shirtwaists and boxy skirts and plain blouses—clothes that made no statement about the body underneath. She seemed like someone who was trying very hard to keep her colors from bleeding over the outlines. The order of her desktop made me feel like I had just shouted in a church. I thought she was too organized to have a murderer for a son.

  She eyed me with vague disapproval as if she expected that bad things always preceded good, but then allowed a smile that so altered her expression that it seemed as though another person were hiding inside her, one who only came out occasionally and then ran back inside, as if unprepared for the weather.

  “Can I help you with something?”

  The sound of her voice interrupting the library silence caused me to lose whatever fragile resolve I had mustered about my stolen book.

  “Do you have a question?” she asked.

  “No.”

  A framed picture sat on her desk. It showed a boy a few years older than I. Acne had made a ruddy landscape of his face. In the picture he sat in front of the familiar blue sheet that the hired photographer hung on the gymnasium wall when he came for photo day. The boy gazed off to the left and up as if he were trying to conjure an idea. My mother always kept the photo proof I brought home from school even though the words “Bob Boltz, Photographer. Family and Other” were written across it. But Mrs. Poole had obviously spent the money and ordered this photo specially, for there was no gold cursive marring the image. I had heard kids talking about her son, but there were many different stories. In one, he had murdered someone in a botched holdup at a hardware store in Indio. In another, he was a member of a gang that had been terrorizing towns around the Salton Sea. No one really knew the truth, but each boy pronounced his version of events with somber certainty, the way newscasters appeared when announcing how many people died in a plane crash, people whom they never knew, but for whom they had become designated mourners. The photo on Mrs. Poole’s desk sat in a heavy brown frame decorated with painted flowers. The words “For Mom” were stenciled on one of the larger leaves that bent down from the stalk like an open palm. I knew that inmates made license plates. I wondered if they made picture frames as well.

  Mrs. Poole saw where my gaze had fallen and her face tightened. “What is it you need?”

  I could not make myself admit to my theft and say what I had come for so I went on to my next class, my burden hidden in my backpack.

  My botched encounter with the librarian dogged me all day. I had become newly inhibited about most things I did and said, and I wished I had not behaved so stupidly. During the afternoon basketball game, I stood in the circle waiting for big Ernesto and the opposing oversized twelve-year-old center to fight it out for the jump ball. So much self-recrimination welled up in my chest, I had to release it.

  “Irritation!” I hissed. “Horrible lack of judgment!” The enemy center’s hand reached into the air a millisecond too late by which time Ernesto slapped the ball halfway down the court with his fleshy paw. Later in the game, when the teams were lined up for a free throw, I repeated the word “shame” in a low whisper until it sounded as though the Salton Sea had broken its bounds and was heading toward the basketball court.

  After the game, Coach Watson called me out of the locker room. It wasn’t the kind of talk that I had seen on After-school Specials where the coach turned a truant student’s life around with one meaningful speech and a slightly-too-hard chuck on the shoulder.

  “What the hell were you saying out there? What the hell is wrong with you?” Watson said, and I knew that if I had just yelled something about somebody’s mother eating worms I would not have had to listen to Watson lecture me about respect and sportsmanship and how he had given me a chance on this team even though I wasn’t any good at basketball, but it was a small school and difficult to field a team and he felt sorry for me because of my situation at home. He told me I had let him down, and that it wasn’t only me who had to be embarrassed, but he had to be embarrassed as well because of his horrible lack of judgment. I felt the truth of the words like a river of disgrace coursing through my chest. Shame was as familiar and comforting as the pillow on my bed, which was emaciated and full of years of my smell and which I couldn’t imagine sleeping without.

  When he finally ordered me back to the locker room, I kept to myself. I dressed facing my locker, using my back to deflect the other boys’ loud judgments that I was a queer and a creep. But my attempt to disappear was thwarted when the school secretary opened the door and called my name. I couldn’t believe that in such a short time Watson had managed to engage the principal in my infraction.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “We need you. It’s your brother again.”

  If the principal had called me out on account of my behavior on the court, I might have earned my teammates’ grudging respect. Now I was only polishing my reputation as the brother of the retard. I grabbed my backpack and my gym clothes, trying to ignore the gauntlet of derision I had to pass through. I followed the secretary to the back door of the school. She opened it and pointed, and I saw my brother crouched at the jagged edge of the concrete schoolyard.

  “He screamed when we went near him just like last time,” she said. His teacher called him a flight risk. This was his third escape in a year.

  I set my books on a bench and went to him. He was wearing his customary oversized clothes. His T-shirt fell over his bent form creating a tent around his legs. He didn’t look up. He rarely registered another person’s presence, and I was used to assuming his acknowledgement. I squatted down beside him and watched him dig in the dirt. Each time he escaped his classroom he came back to this very spot. I had no idea why he was digging, or if there was any purpose to it at all, but the fact that he came to the same place made me think that he had some intention. I reminded myself that I was only inventing this logic because the idea of him working mindlessly awoke a guilt in me that was never allowed too deep a sleep. He worked slowly, stopping frequently to wipe his hands on his pant legs because he couldn’t abide the feel of dirt sticking to his skin.

  “Hey, Mal,” I said, “you have to go back inside now.”

  He did not respond; I did not expect him to.

  “School’s not over,” I said. “We can dig later.” I knew I had to stop him, clean him off, and bring him back inside, but part of me wanted to let him be. I never knew why he escaped, whether it was for reasons any regular kid would leave his class if he could—because school was boring, the teachers were irritable, and the children were engaged in their own private games of power and torture—or whether Malcolm had whole other reasons. No matter. I was proud of him. His flights were wondrous, because escape was something I knew was not a possibility for me. I was trapped by the very things he lacked—awareness, concern about others’ judgments, and by the knowledge that, sooner or later, I would be the only one left to protect him. He was the one who was free.

  I brought him back to room 23. The other kids at school cut a wide swath around the “tard room,” as if some force inside might reach out and grab them and suck out their otherwise normal
brains. Some of the boys made horrible, mocking sounds if they heard laughter coming from behind the closed door, and I had more than once heard my brother referred to as a freak. Malcolm’s teacher, Mrs. Murphy, gave me a note to bring home to my mother that said Malcolm was continuing to be difficult to manage in the classroom and if the situation didn’t improve, measures would have to be taken.

  Later that afternoon, Laurel crumpled up the note and laughed. “Here’s an improvement,” she said. “How about they hire a teacher who can keep track of her kids?”

  THAT NIGHT, I WOKE TO the noise of Malcolm’s scream. I waited for the reassuring clump of Laurel’s feet to hit the ground, for the sound of the card curtain to flutter noisily apart, for her groggy, soothing voice to urge Malcolm deeper into sleep. But Malcolm screamed again.

  “Mom!” I yelled, stumbling out of bed and into the living room. My underwear was twisted around my hips, and I tried to right things as I felt for Malcolm in the dark. He was sitting up on the couch, hitting his leg with his hand.

  “Spy, spy, spy,” he said.

  “Mom!” I called. I was angry that I had to be the one to get out of bed in the middle of the night to take care of my brother. I gathered him to my chest and began to rock him, holding his arms tight to his body the way my mother had taught me to do so that he didn’t scratch or hit himself. I risked letting go with one hand, then snapped on the light above the couch. I was not supposed to try to wake him out of one of his night terrors, but they scared me. When in the grip of one, he appeared to be awake but he wasn’t. His eyes were open but he did not see me. I felt frightened that my own perceptions would desert me, too.

  The card curtain was drawn open, the sweep of it pulled to one side and caught by a hook so that it resembled the way girls at school lodged their hair behind an ear. Laurel’s bed was untouched. She was out having sex with Richard. She usually left after she thought Malcolm and I were asleep. I knew she would come home in a few hours, creeping into the trailer thinking I had no idea where she had been or what she had been doing because she didn’t know so many things about me, like the fact that I knew what a blow job was and how men had sex with other men. She was unaware of the actual curriculum of my grade, thought I was learning something about American history and diagramming sentences, when in fact I had recently learned how to spell “fellatio” and sometimes I got a bathroom pass in order to lock myself in a stall and jerk off. That Laurel had sex with Richard in his Airstream in Slab City was the only information I held over her, but it was useless as any kind of bargaining chip because if I told her that I knew she would simply smile and ruffle my hair. She was not like TV mothers who ferociously guarded their children against the realities of the body and the strange and sometimes unsightly acts it performed. She walked around the trailer in her underwear and peed with the bathroom door open.

  During his terrors, Malcolm was somehow more present than he ever was during the day. He looked at me as though he was about to say something, maybe even explain what he had been thinking about all his life. But I knew not to make the mistake of hoping. Hope was only a selfish desire to escape the misery of my culpability, and I knew from reading Twelve Angry Men, which I found in the trash outside the library because some kid had crossed out “Angry” and replaced it with “Horny,” that I could not be found innocent; the evidence was stacked against me.

  “Spy, spy, spy,” he repeated.

  “There are no spies in here,” I said, rocking my brother, although it was unlikely that he was actually talking about a spy. I was used to taking his sounds and gestures and inventing logic around them. That is what my mother and I did: we created Malcolm’s world for him and pretended we were right. “He wants juice,” Laurel would say if he smacked his lips in the direction of the refrigerator, if the day was especially hot, or if she happened to be thirsty herself. But what if she was wrong? What if Malcolm wanted the opposite of juice? What if he didn’t want at all? What if the fall had knocked desire right out of him?

  His body changed from being a heavy lump in my arms into something stiff with the architecture of will, and I knew that the terror was over.

  “Hey man,” I said. He looked toward Laurel’s room. “She’s not here now.” He whimpered. “You had a dream.” I was certain this was wrong. The terrors were not dreams, not even nightmares. They were more like the moment when a cartoon character ran off a cliff before he started to fall; they were a seizure of understanding. I believed that during those nocturnal episodes my brother realized that he was trapped by useless fixations, by the need to make the sound “ba” over and over again, or to count peas. I thought that if I were in his situation I’d be frightened all the time. But I knew that in order to have fear you had to care about things never changing from the safe and predictable way they were, and it was not Malcolm who cared about this, but me. So it turned out that Malcolm was lucky. I was the one who was scared to death.

  In many ways I was envious of my brother. He could move through a crowd of people without touching anybody like a falcon darting through a forest at full speed, never getting snagged on a branch or crashing into a tree trunk. Some days, I would try to see how long I could go without the feel of another person on my skin. On those mornings, I woke up, dodged my mother’s pets and adjustments, her hand running up my back or along the line of my jaw as if I were one of her beloved desert plants. At school I tried to walk the halls without brushing up against another person. When my teachers passed back homework I was careful to take the paper without touching their hands. But after half a day of this physical abstinence, my body craved contact so that almost without realizing it I would move into the path of an oncoming student in the hallway, or sit too close to someone during lunchtime, suffering his derision just to rid myself of that terrible feeling of isolation. How did Malcolm do it? Malcolm who needed everything needed nothing.

  He fell asleep in my arms. I laid him down and tucked the sheets around him. Then I made my customary rounds to check that the oven was off and the door locked. I checked each more than once because sometimes, when I was alone and nervous, I believed it was possible for air to move an oven knob or for some strange force to unlock the door. Safety seemed like a slippery thing, something that was there one moment, and then not.

  Headlights washed over the house, brightening the windows, and the sound of tires crunching on the rubble driveway swelled, then stopped. The car engine cut out, and the trailer fell into darkness again. The engine ticked gently as the driver’s-side door made its customary squeal. I snapped off the light over Malcolm’s couch and ran into my bedroom just as Laurel entered the trailer. She barely made a sound. I imagined her holding her suntanned huaraches to her chest, tiptoeing past Malcolm so as not to disturb what she imagined was his eventless sleep. I considered calling out, letting her know that I was on to her and that she had not been there to take care of Malcolm when he needed her most. But there was nothing to be gained by trying to pin blame on my mother; fault would eventually redound to me. The card curtain made a noise like a thousand tumbling dominoes as she let it fall from its hook.

  FOUR

  After school the next day, I picked up Malcolm in room 23. When I opened the door, the room felt strange. It was too warm for one thing and slightly muzzy; I felt as though I were looking through a camera lens that had not been adjusted to focus. A boy in a wheelchair hung his head over his desk in a way that did not resemble either concentration or sleep. In one corner Mrs. Murphy led a group of kids in a song that sounded like “Twinkle, Twinkle” only the words were stretched out like Silly Putty—“star” became “staaaaah”—and the tune wandered erratically like a wind-blown plastic bag. Malcolm sat at a desk counting paper clips and putting them into piles. I told Mrs. Murphy I had to take him to the dentist.

  “Doesn’t your mother take you to your appointments?” she said.

  “No.”

  She nodded, her grey bob swinging around her jaw, as if adding this information to a gro
wing list in her head.

  We waited for two hours at the free clinic. Malcolm was content sitting on the floor of the waiting room, fingering old copies of Ranger Rick. He made some of his sounds and shook his hands in the air until I wiped off Magic Marker stains he’d gotten on his fingers at school. Kids stared openly at him, but this bothered me less than the parents, who pretended not to notice but drew their children to them protectively and rearranged their sitting positions so that they no longer faced us as if they meant to erase us by looking away. Finally, a nurse called our names. She led us into another room where eight chairs were lined up side by side, all but two of them filled with open-mouthed patients. Dentists and assistants in white circled the chairs like bees.

  “We’ll do you both at the same time,” she said, her nylon thighs swishing together under her white uniform as she led us to the available chairs.

  “One at a time would be better,” I said.

  “Better for who? We have a waiting room full of people.”