by Dan Chaon
And then what? Steal him away? Drive to Canada, to South America, fugitives. He would need to save up some money, he thought. It would take a while for him to find a job, but he would manage it. You could be a bartender anywhere in the world, he thought, and he let the fantasy float up briefly before it began to lose air, like a failed balloon.
There was a pickup in front of him. An old farmer, perhaps mesmerized or comatose, was puttering slowly through town. With excruciating slowness, they passed the Green Lantern bar, the American National Bank, the House of Photography.
Five minutes.
And he saw that it was useless. He would never make it to Judy’s house in time, he realized, and it sent a current of electricity through him. Worse than useless. He saw the danger he’d put himself in so clearly that for a second he couldn’t breathe. Five years in prison, he thought. There was no traffic in the opposite direction, and he turned abruptly, making an illegal U-turn in the middle of Euclid Avenue. The sports car behind him slowed, irritably, and the driver, a teenage girl, watched him with gaping alarm as he turned around and headed west again.
Six minutes.
——
By the time he arrived back at the intersection of Euclid and Old Oak, his hands were beginning to shake. Seven and a half minutes. He accelerated as he entered the concrete underpass beneath the railroad tracks, with its graffiti and wet, lime-encrusted walls, thinking he could make up a little time, but then, as if summoned by his anxiety, a patrol car pulled up behind him and he was forced to slow back down to the speed limit. Thirty-five miles an hour, and even the cop seemed a little impatient with it. The guy pulled up close, tailgating, and Troy could see the fatty, weight-lifter’s face of Wallace Bean, one of the cops who, along with Kevin Onken and Ronnie Whitmire, had been his arresting officer on that night. Troy couldn’t help but recall again the sound of Whitmire’s pistol shot, and Bean shouting “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!” as Troy called Loomis’s name and wept. Bean was perhaps the least loathsome of the three of them—he’d been a tight end on the football team when Troy was in high school, a large, dumb, friendly kid, the only one of the three of them who seemed to recognize that there was something wrong with breaking into a person’s home and putting a bullet into the ceiling of his child’s bedroom. “Your kid’s okay, don’t worry, don’t worry,” Bean had said as he put his large hand on Troy’s head, helping him into the police car.
But still. The irony of Bean’s appearance was a bit much for him to take at this particular, anxious moment, and when he saw the flashing yellow lights of a School Zone sign up ahead, he bit down hard on the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. Here was South Elementary, where Loomis would be going if things had been different. SCHOOL ZONE: 20 MPH: SCHOOL ZONE, the sign said, and there was nothing he could do. Even though twenty miles per hour felt slower than walking, he let the speedometer sink down. Eight and a half minutes. He put on his turn signal at the corner of Old Oak and Deadwood Avenue, and Bean finally went around him, passing on the right. He drove past, not noticing Troy, focused on some mission or another that waited a bit farther south.
With Bean headed elsewhere, Troy sped down Deadwood. He had to take the risk, and he pressed down on the gas, faster and faster. Forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour. He passed the White Buffalo Trailer Court, where once he’d spent his childhood hours with Bruce and Michelle and baby Ray, he passed the familiar rows of ramshackle houses that edged the town. They were used to people speeding down Deadwood Avenue in cheap cars with broken mufflers, they didn’t even look up as he passed. He swung around the turn of his own street, Gehrig, and fishtailed on the gravel of the unpaved road. Nine and a half minutes. He roared up his driveway and threw open the door of his car, not even pausing to slam it shut, fumbling with the house keys in his pockets. He sprinted through the gate and toward the back door, and when he saw Jonah standing there in his backyard, standing at the back door, his hands cupped around the window, trying to peer in, he didn’t even have time to think about it.
He saw the color drain from Jonah’s face as he approached, surprised and alarmed and stricken. “Oh,” Jonah said. “Hey, I . . .” And he held up his hands as if Troy might be rushing forward to hit him.
But he didn’t have time to consider it. Troy brushed past Jonah. “I’m in a big hurry,” he grimaced, as his trembling fingers fitted the key into the back door. Jiggling wildly. He threw the door open and almost fell into the kitchen, toward the phone. He glanced at his watch, his fingers clumsy and shaking as he dialed the number.
Ten and a half minutes. He gasped into the phone. “This is 1578835. Checking in.”
There was a long silence. And then a voice, male, stoned-sounding, said: “Okay. You’re clear.”
——
He didn’t know how long he leaned against the wall, catching his breath. He felt light-headed, his heart still beating rapidly, and he thought ahead to the questions that Lisa Fix might ask him the next time they met. “Let’s see,” she would say. “Tuesday, October eighth. Why did it take you so long to get home? Almost eleven minutes.” And there would have to be an excuse.
It was a few more minutes before he remembered Jonah. He looked over at the back door, still ajar, and kneaded his tired shoulders with his fingers. “Jonah!” he called. “Come on in! The door is open.”
No answer.
With effort, he heaved himself away from the wall he had been melting into, and walked toward the screen door. “Jonah!” he called. “Come on in!”
But Jonah was nowhere in sight. Troy stared out into the empty backyard, frowning. The old swing hung limply from the branch of the tree.
“Hello?” Troy said. But no one was there.
18
October 10, 1996
They grew up together in Little Bow, South Dakota. Two brothers, Troy and Jonah. They ran through the bare, grassless backyard toward the railroad tracks, carrying sticks and yelling “Charge,” yelling “Seize them!” like soldiers in a cartoon, and Troy, who was older, led the way. They swept their weapons down on a battalion of high weeds.
They sat at the kitchen table eating bologna sandwiches that their grandfather had made, and under their chairs, the dog Elizabeth lowered her muzzle thoughtfully onto her paws, hoping for food to fall. Troy ate silently for a while, moody; his eyes rested on Jonah. He could be bossy sometimes, even a bully, but Jonah knew that Troy would protect him.
“We should set up a fortress, don’t you think?” Troy said—he was a soldier talking to his wise, bearded adviser—and Jonah nodded. “Yes,” he said, and he remembered the clutter of plywood and two-by-fours that his grandfather had left behind the garage. They would spend the afternoon building, and when their mother came home she would call from the back door. She was tired after a day at work, but she wanted to talk to them. She pressed her lips against Troy’s forehead, and then Jonah’s, listening to their stories as Grandpa Joe and the dog came softly from the little back room into the kitchen.
And when they became adults they would be close, Jonah thought. There would be a quiet attachment between them, even though they took different paths. They would sit at the bar drinking beers together. Jonah would stand on Troy’s doorstep, an armful of Christmas gifts for Loomis; they’d sit on the hood of Troy’s car, watching Fourth of July fireworks, and later they might go camping together, or drive up to see Mount Rushmore, or Devil’s Tower; if Jonah had a flat tire, he would naturally call Troy. “I need some help,” he’d say, and Troy would make some wry joke. Then Troy would say: “Sure, bro. I’ll be there in two minutes.”
——
Was this corny? Clichéd?
Jonah wasn’t sure. The truth was, he didn’t really know how he might have felt in another life, in an alternate universe. He had seen movies and television shows, he’d read books, but he had very little sense of what daily, long-term friendship, brotherhood, might be like.
So far in his life he hadn’t had much experience with relationships. He k
new what it felt like to fail, he knew that somehow he’d made a mess of his friendship with Steve and Holiday. He knew what it was like to live alone, to sit in a silent apartment, or in a bar. He knew, from a few experiences, what a one-night stand felt like, what it was like to have anonymous sex. He knew what it was like to work with people, the way to get along with coworkers. He knew how to be invisible, the way he was in high school, speaking to no one, walking with his head down through the hallways. He knew how to live with his mother. But this didn’t amount to much, he realized.
He spent a lot of time thinking about it. He sat cross-legged on the living room floor of his trailer, in front of the coffee table, writing down the names of everyone he’d ever known on notecards. He divided it into categories: aquaintances, bosses/landlords, coworkers, potential friends, relatives, lovers. It was like a game of solitaire. What is a relationship between two people? he thought. How is it accomplished? The sun came in through slats on the blinds. The trailer was full of small thick-bodied gray moths, Millers, they were called, clustered on the windowsills, beating their wings lethargically. He scooped them up by the handful and put them outside, where they fluttered in the dusty gravel that was his lawn.
He was thinking about his various failures. The mysterious ones most of all. Like, once, in Chicago, it was an older woman, a lady in her mid-forties, about his mother’s age. Her name was Marie. She was wiry and athletic of body, and planted her fingers into the skin of Jonah’s unscarred back like stakes as he pushed inside of her. He was pretty happy. He felt like he was figuring things out, as if he were on the verge of coming to some realization.
Marie was happy at first, too. They talked about books, about Saul Bellow, whom she had met once, and about pop music, about the local low-fi music scene. They talked about how the idea of what was beautiful changed from decade to decade. She told him that he was what she was looking for, that he was better than beautiful—she liked his eyes, their intensity, and his hair, which was blond and flat, and his face, which would have reminded her of a boy from a sixties beach movie. “But now it’s something different altogether,” she said, and leaned toward him. “I can’t put my finger on it,” she said, and reached out and touched his lips with her index finger.
But then, afterward, in the dark of Jonah’s efficiency, she suddenly changed. He didn’t know what had happened. She seemed sad and upset. She drew her knees up under the covers, and put her chin on them. “Oh,” she said, by which he guessed she meant “What am I doing here?” Or “What have I done?”
“Are you okay?” Jonah said. He was thinking of his mother, who used to sit in this way, naked under the covers, drinking wine from a plastic tumbler and reading her books on unexplained mysteries. It occurred to him that this woman had a son who was gravely injured—killed, perhaps—and that she was thinking of him now. “Hey,” Jonah said. “Don’t be sad. It’s okay.”
“No,” she said, with bitterness. “It’s not ‘okay.’ It’s actually something very different than ‘okay.’ ”
All right, Jonah thought. What she was saying was probably true, and he waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. “You can tell me if you want,” he said at last, but she shook her head. “Sometimes it helps to talk about it,” he said. “Is it about your son?”
“I don’t have a son!” she said venomously, and when she looked at him a film of tear-water was thickening over her eyes and lashes.
“Jesus,” she said. “What are you?”
He was silent for a moment, not really understanding her question. “I’m just a person,” he said. “I’m not anything specific.” It made him feel weird. He felt the shards of his life moving around, organizing and reorganizing themselves.
“Why do you think I have a son?” said this lady, who looked so much like Jonah’s mom. Her eyes were wide and suspicious now, and she flinched out of bed when he tried to talk, leaning over the floor to pick up her clothes and press them against her breasts and crotch as if he had sneaked into her house while she was naked. She cradled her clothes as she backed into the bathroom and shut the door.
“What’s wrong?” Jonah called to her, and he could hear her beyond the bathroom door, grunting and struggling into her clothes as he knocked politely. “Are you all right?” he called. But she wouldn’t answer.
What are you? she asked, and he thought about it again.
At the restaurant in Chicago, he wasn’t anything. Just a worker. He’d spent most of his time cutting vegetables, chopping. He was good at this—he could slice a mushroom into paper-thin pieces, reduce a head of broccoli into tiny flowerettes in seconds. The cuts on his fingers he barely noticed, and his coworkers sometimes thought this was funny, maybe because he was so scarred up. He thought something was probably wrong with his nerves, because most of the time he didn’t even feel pain, and he’d sliced the ends off his fingers and it was only the blood that told him that he’d made a mistake. “Primo,” they called to him. “Primo, you are bleeding.”
Most of the men he worked with in Chicago were Mexican, or from some Latin American country. They didn’t ask any questions. They were always talking in Spanish and then looking at Jonah brightly and laughing. In some ways, Jonah thought, this was maybe for the best. He picked up a few things. He knew words like cebolla and cuchillo and cabron, and sometimes they would teach him phrases—like once they got him to say “muchas panochas en America,” and when he repeated it there was such an uproar of hilarity so that he knew it was probably obscene. But when he asked the line cook, Alphonso, what panocha meant, Alphonso was solemn. “It means ‘sugar,’ Primo,” he said. “Brown sugar.”
Were they friends, Jonah and these men? He supposed. The night after he’d gotten the information from the PeopleSearch Agency, the night he’d found his brother, he wished he could tell them. He tried to think of the word for “brother” in Spanish. Hermano. But what was the word for “found”? What was the word for “adopted”? For “long-lost”? How did you say “I am going to be leaving soon”?
He didn’t know. He smiled at them more than usual that night, trying to show them through his expression what he meant. Since he’d spent so much time with them, he imagined that they were close in a way, but most of the time he didn’t really know what they were saying. He had thought about learning Spanish, but he decided that if he could speak their language they wouldn’t like him as much anymore.
None of them seemed curious about his scars, though once a little dishwasher, a wiry, high-cheekboned Mayan-looking boy named Ernesto had pointed to them. He balled up his fists and made a soft “tok” with his tongue, miming fighting. Jonah shook his head. “No,” he said.
Jonah showed him his teeth, tapping them.
“Dientes,” Ernesto said.
“Woof,” Jonah said, imitating a dog. “Arf, arf.”
“Perro,” Ernesto said.
Ernesto nodded solemnly, apparently understanding, though also wary. He reached out and ran his finger along the thick, pale raised skin that ran along Jonah’s forearm. “Perro?” he said again, uncertainly, and Jonah nodded, flushed a bit, exhilarated. This was the first person he’d told the truth to since he’d come to Chicago, and the moment seemed fraught with danger. He had unbuttoned his shirt and showed Ernesto a little of his chest. “Ay,” Ernesto said, and Jonah smiled at him, shrugging. He waited, not breathing, while Ernesto touched his skin. “El lobo,” Jonah said, which he knew was the Spanish word for wolf, and Ernesto chuckled, drawing away a little. “It’s okay,” Jonah told him, and Ernesto grinned. He puffed out his chest and drew an “X” over Jonah’s bared skin with his finger, swip, swip, like Zorro. “S’okay,” he said, repeating, imitating as if Jonah were full of bravado. Jonah had thought that perhaps it was the beginning of a friendship.
But then a few days later, he went to work and found that Ernesto wasn’t there anymore. When Jonah asked, Alphonso simply shrugged. Ernesto had been killed, Alphonso said—stabbed in a fight outside some bar in the Mexican ar
ea of town.
“Jesus,” Jonah said, and he was aware of that feeling of velocity again. “He was just a kid, wasn’t he? How old was he?”
“I don’t know, Primo,” Alphonso said, and looked at Jonah heavily. “Old enough to die, I guess,” he said, and showed Jonah the palms of his hands. It wasn’t Jonah’s fault, of course, that Ernesto was dead, but the way Alphonso looked at him left a film of guilt for the rest of the night. He was leaving. He thought of that woman, backing away from him. “What are you,” she said. He didn’t know.
And now, what? He found himself thinking about that moment in Troy’s backyard, when Troy had driven up unexpectedly, just as Jonah was cupping his hand to peer in the back window.
——
When he saw Troy the next day, he’d been able to explain it away easily enough. “Sorry about . . . yesterday,” he’d said. “I was just stopping by because I had a question about the schedule. I hope I didn’t . . . disturb you.”
And Troy had only shrugged. “Mm,” Troy said, distractedly. “No big deal.”
But still, it was troubling. He’d been so deeply in his own head, pacing along the circumference of Troy’s house, touching the edges of the windowsills, pretending that he belonged there. It was his yard, his home, his child’s swing hanging from the tree. We’ll clean it up and it will be pretty nice, he was thinking, and then he’d turned to see Troy rushing forward.
His first intuition was that Troy was going to hit him. He imagined for a moment that Troy had found out somehow, and he pictured being knocked down and kicked repeatedly in the side and stomach. “Who do you think you are?” Troy would roar. “What are you?”
