by Diana Wieler
“I’m so sorry, Jens. Give yourself some time.”
I nodded numbly and pushed out. That was the one thing I really didn’t have.
TWO
I loved my truck, the demonstrator Jack Lahanni had arranged for me when I started. It was a white F-150XL, with a custom box that someone had ordered and never taken delivery on. When I’d gone home at Christmas, I parked in front of the house, behind Dad’s glass truck, so no one in Ile-des-Sapins would miss it.
Driving back to my apartment that Friday, I parked on the street, not in my stall. I didn’t want my landlord, Mr. Delbeggio, to know I was home. I owed him for half of February and all of March.
I sat down in the chair that faced the balcony, still in my suit. Late in the afternoon the sky clouded over and it began to rain. One of my windows was open, curtains flapping, water pooling on the floor, but I couldn’t make myself get up to close it.
I was sure my father had never been fired. I knew he’d left school at seventeen, to help his family when his dad died. He’d had other jobs but all my life he’d been the window man. As a kid, I’d thought that was the best job you could have - fixing things that were broken, replacing old with new.
Dad worked twelve and fourteen hours a day in the summer but even when I was little, I’d wait up for him. I’d sit at the table while he ate his late dinner, happy just to look at him, big shoulders in coveralls. He’d grin across at me as if we shared a secret, and actually we did. He loved Mom but he hated parsnips, and I was the only one who saw him scrape them into the garbage.
I didn’t know how to go home a failure.
A sudden banging on the door made me jump. Oh, God. Delbeggio had seen my truck. What was I going to tell him this time?
It was my brother, Daniel, dripping in the hallway. He was wearing his performance hat, an Australian cowboy hat that looked like an old-time leather fedora.
“Jens,” Daniel said, “I’m in trouble, real shit this time. You’ve got to help me.” He hesitated. “And I need twenty bucks for the cab. He’s holding my guitar.”
I shut the door in his face.
“Jens!” He hammered with the side of his fist, almost frantic now. “I’m not kidding. It’s Mogen Kruse. He says I owe him the money – all of it! - I swear to God.”
“How much is ‘all of it’?” I said through the door.
When he finally spoke, I could barely hear him. “Almost five thousand dollars.”
I sagged, clinging to the doorknob. I’d seen this coming, warned them about it at Christmas, but it didn’t stop the blow. Five thousand dollars was a lot for any family. For ours it was a fortune.
I opened the door. “Shit for brains! Are you trying to kill Dad? Do you want him to have another heart attack?”
But I had enough money for the cab, and I gave it to him.
•
I was the first one who believed my brother wasn’t deaf. I don’t remember him as a baby but I know he had a lot of ear and throat infections, that he was always on antibiotics. As a toddler he played by himself a lot. And he didn’t talk. He didn’t even try.
But there was something about him, a bright glimmer in his eyes as he watched me, that made me sure he was listening. At three they took him to Winnipeg for testing and got the confirmation - his hearing was fine. But still Daniel didn’t talk. The adults in Ile-des-Sapins started using the word autistic, which actually sounded kind of neat because I didn’t know what it meant.
The kids weren’t using neat words. One afternoon a bunch of us were playing in Shane Lasko’s yard and he said Daniel was a retard.
Something broke inside me. I threw myself at him, arms swinging wildly. It was my first fight and Shane was bigger than me, but I’d caught him by surprise. Once I had him down I had to keep thumping him — I was afraid he’d kill me if he got up. Mrs. Lasko dragged me off. She made my mother come and get me.
I knew what I’d done was wrong but I felt better for having answered him. You didn’t say things about my family. I thought maybe someone would be proud, but my mother was just upset. She sent me to my room. When my father came home, I listened with my ear against the bedroom door. I heard the tears in my mother’s voice. “I’ve always worried…that it might be in his blood. It’s got to stop now, Karl…”
I didn’t understand. Neither Shane nor I had been bleeding.
My father came in to talk to me. It was dusk and the light slanting into my room was thick gold. It lit up the dust on his work clothes. He looked tired.
“Jens,” he said, “you don’t hit people.”
I blurted out what Shane Lasko had said and he didn’t flinch. Maybe he’d already heard it.
“Daniel’s not hurt,” he said. “He doesn’t care.”
“I care,” I said fiercely. “I thought we were supposed to stick up for our family.”
“We are. Your family is the most important thing.” He leaned close, and I could smell the gravel roads he’d been on. “But a strong person has self-control. You don’t hit people, Jens.” Dad lowered his voice. “Unless somebody hits you first.”
He gave my shoulder a squeeze and I understood. This was men stuff.
We walked out to the kitchen for supper. Daniel was sitting on the floor in the living room with his Fisher-Price record player. He had a record on and he was turning it under the needle with his hand, listening to the same stretch of sound, forward, then backward, then forward again. He might have been there for hours.
“I got in trouble for you today,” I whispered proudly to the back of his head. Daniel kept turning the record.
A few months later, the rumor reached our house that Mrs. Melnick wouldn’t let Daniel start school if he wasn’t talking. It launched something in my mom that I’d never seen, something powerful. Before she’d tended to keep Daniel at home but now she took him everywhere, tugged him along on every errand, hers and mine.
“Take your brother with you!” she’d call as I went out the door. Some days it bothered me. Who wanted a four-year-old along when you played with your friends? But secretly I was glad. I wanted him to be normal, too.
Daniel really wasn’t much trouble. He was so disinterested in everyone else. He’d sit or play by himself at the edge of our game. I just had to watch that he didn’t wander away.
“Keep him close,” my mother warned. “I want him to hear you, listen to you, all the time.”
It wasn’t enough, though. At home she began to talk to him constantly, sing to him, involve him in every conversation, usually in French. I hated it. She’d never taught French to me. But it was her first language and in her panic she thought it might be his, too.
It bothered my father, who didn’t speak French, either. “Jeez, Mariette, you’re just going to confuse him.”
My mother isn’t a big woman but I saw her draw herself up in the kitchen that day. For an instant she looked larger than my dad, larger than all of us. “We don’t know what he’s learning right now. It can’t hurt, Karl,” she said quietly.
But it did hurt. It hurt me. I hated the sound of it, this language running over my head like water, too fast, too different for me to understand. It didn’t matter that Daniel didn’t respond. I felt utterly excluded.
“I could teach you, too, Jens,” my mother said, but I didn’t want to learn. I could talk just fine.
I decided I was going to solve this myself. I closed Daniel in our room with me.
“This is Spiderman,” I said, holding up the red-and-blue toy figure for him to see. “He’s got a comic, too. He’s way better than Superman or Cyclops. He’s the best guy. Say it. Say ’best guy.’”
Daniel looked bored. I was determined. I went through the room, my toys, which he already knew but mostly ignored.
“This is a book, Daniel. We read books. I can read,” I said proudly, and rattled off the title. “Say ’book.’”
Nothing. He usually liked being with me but he seemed ready to leave. I dug through the closet and found something at th
e bottom.
“This is a xylophone. It’s the only word that starts with the letter X. You always see it up on the pictures of the alphabet. Say ’xylophone.’”
His hand was on the doorknob, trying to get out. I hit one of the keys with a pencil, just to get his attention. The high-pitched metallic note rang through the room, making him turn. I struck another key, the green one, and got a lower sound. His face lit up.
He came at me, reaching for it, but I held it away, over his head. “Say ’xylophone,’ Daniel,” I demanded.
I was frustrating him. He climbed onto the bed to be taller than me but I moved out of his reach. He jumped down to follow, getting angrier.
“Say ’xylophone,’” I insisted. He was making sounds in his throat as he grabbed at me, a high-pitched whine. If he cried I’d be in trouble but I wasn’t giving in.
I twisted away from him. “Say it!”
“Jens!” He stamped his foot and spit out the word at the same time. I whirled around, astonished, and he grabbed the xylophone out of my hand. He dropped to the floor and began tapping on it with a piece of Lego.
“You said my name,” I whispered. He ignored me now, but it didn’t matter. I knew.
“Hey, I did it! I made him talk. He said my name!” I called, running out to my parents. We couldn’t get anything out of him for the rest of the day, but I went to bed feeling magical. Doors opened once you knew what somebody wanted.
Language swept through Daniel that summer like a brush fire. English, French, even scraps of German — swear words my father had thought went over our heads. My mother had been right. He’d been learning all along.
He talked softly at first, and mostly to me. If a neighbor leaned over the fence and tried to engage him, it was like an assault, an invasion. He’d slip behind me and whisper, “Scheisskopf.” Shithead, my father’s favorite curse.
But sometimes I’d hear him by himself, repeating things as if he was playing with the words.
“Daniel, tu sais ce que c’est? It’s my mixing bowl. I’m going to make a cake.”
It bothered me that he still used that language, seeing that he didn’t need it. We were brothers. We were supposed to understand each other.
Then one afternoon in our room he picked up Spiderman.
“Best guy,” he said.
The feeling in my chest caught me by surprise, so big I could barely hold it. No matter what, I was the one who’d started this, made him reach out of his world and into ours.
Nothing would ever change that.
“Best guy, Daniel,” I said.
THREE
By the time Daniel had paid the cab driver and come back up to my apartment, I’d decided I was going to try to help him. I told myself I owed it to Mom and Dad, but underneath I was relieved to deal with some crisis other than my own. Maybe I could even fix it. Oh, God, I needed to do something right.
“Give me the guitar,” I told him, opening the door just wide enough for him to pass it through. I didn’t want him to see my place. I knew how bare it was.
He handed me his six-string acoustic. At home he had three more – two electric, including a pearl-front Fender Stratocaster that he’d won over the summer at SunJam, a provincial competition and concert.
I locked the apartment door behind me.
“Where are we going?” Daniel asked cautiously.
“To see Mogen Kruse,” I said.
“Jens, no! He’s really pissed at me.”
“That’s at you.” I started down the hallway toward the stairs. “I know how to handle people.”
Daniel looked surprised when we walked past the parking lot and over to the street where my truck was.
“Somebody parked in my spot,” I said. I unlocked the doors. Daniel hesitated, even though he was getting wet.
“Do you want my help or not?”
He got in. I fired up the engine and pulled into traffic.
“Where’s the contract? I want to see it again.”
“At home. In that metal box where Mom and Dad keep all their papers locked up.”
“Well, that’s brilliant!”
“I didn’t think I’d need it. Besides, how was I going to get it? I didn’t want them to know where I was going.”
“Where do they think you are?”
“I told them I was busking at the Forks,” Daniel said.
“How’d you get to the city?” My brother had been sixteen for four months but he hadn’t even applied for his learner’s permit.
“I told them I was getting a ride.”
“Yeah, you told them, but how?”
Silence.
“How?”
“Well, what do you think? I thumbed.”
“Jesus, Daniel!” The fury seemed to burst in my chest and my hand swung out for him. I wanted to grab him, shake some sense into him. Instead I thumped his shoulder, maybe too hard.
“Do you want to die? Do you want some nutcase to murder you for that stupid guitar?!”
He was against the door, mad but trying to stay out of my reach. “I know, I know! Get off my case. I’m in enough shit already.”
He sounded like he was on the verge of tears. I took a long breath and tried to let it go.
If we were those ice cream cones, Daniel would be Rocky Road. He’s a blues guitarist, although he likes to think of himself as a performer. Personally, I don’t think he sings that well. He’s all right in the middle range, but his voice has a kind of raspy, frayed quality that sounds better when he’s speaking the words than when he’s holding a note. He says it’s perfect for blues.
Daniel picked up his first guitar when he was eleven. He started to play blues when he was almost thirteen and I was fifteen. That was the year he moved out of the bedroom we shared and into the basement, by himself.
There are a lot of different kinds of blues — Chicago, Delta, Mississippi, Texas – each with its own slightly different swing and style. I don’t like any of them. No matter the pace, it seems to me that blues walk. The music sounds like somebody drifting down the sidewalk with no particular place to go. I think music should run, a driving beat with a destination. I’m a rock ’n’ roll man.
Daniel says that all rock, all country and almost all gospel grew out of the blues. I’m a pretty good arguer and Daniel isn’t, but this is his subject and once you get him started he’ll bore you to death, and take it as a win.
I never told him the truth, that what bothered me the most about blues was the hurt. They’re lost-my-woman, down-on-my-luck, gonna-carve-you-up songs. Daniel was a kid. He’d lived his whole life in the same little town and he had everything. He didn’t deserve to sing about pain. When he started to write those songs, it seemed like the biggest joke in the world.
Mogen Kruse didn’t think so. A producer with a small recording studio in Winnipeg, he saw Daniel at SunJam and gave him his card. A lot of performers build up credibility and an audience for themselves by producing a demo cassette — a CD if they can afford it — which they sell any chance they get, at performances or even busking.
By December, Kruse had convinced Daniel and my parents that nobody gets their tape into a label — even an independent company – without an agent. He told them he’d make the demo recording free of charge, and submit it as Daniel’s agent. He’d also “front” the cost of making the cassette tapes.
The first time I heard about it was at Christmas. Sitting at the kitchen table, the contract in my hand, I had an uneasy feeling. I couldn’t imagine how they got Dad to go along with it. My father is Mennonite German. He gave up the religion but there are things you can’t leave. Old World caution is in the blood.
“When do you have to pay Kruse back for the tapes?” I asked.
“Well, all along, as I sell them,” Daniel said, fidgeting in his chair.
“You?” My brother had played in front of four thousand people at SunJam but he wouldn’t ask the clerk at the Lucky Mart where the toothpaste was.
I turned to Mom. “How
much is this going to cost you?”
“It’s not going to cost her anything,” Daniel cut in. “I told you, I’ll sell the tapes.”
I wasn’t even looking at him. “You know you’re going to wind up paying for it, Mom.”
“Jens, I don’t think this is your concern,” my mother said. But her hands were clasped tightly around the coffee cup in front of her. I knew the glass truck needed new brakes, and two suppliers had phoned for money in the twenty-four hours I’d been home.
“He’s just pissed off because somebody thinks I’m good,” Daniel muttered.
I twisted in my chair to face him. “If he thinks you’re so good, why is this in here?” I found the spot and read out loud, “For the sum of two dollars, either the Agent or the Performer can terminate this contract and all monies will be rendered payable within fifteen days of that termination.”
“Well, that protects me, too,” Daniel said. “He’d have to pay me whatever…”
“Except he doesn’t owe you – you owe him!”
“Until he signs me with a label,” Daniel said stubbornly.
“Keep dreaming, Daniel,” I said in disgust. “It’s what you do best.”
“Jens —” Mom started.
“No, he can’t help it.” My brother pushed away, his chair scraping. “He’s an asshole through and through.”
White heat burst inside me as I leapt to my feet.
“At least I’m doing something…asshole!” I shouted after him.
When I looked back, Mom was staring at me in cold disapproval. I was embarrassed. I’d promised myself that I’d make this visit as an adult.
I drifted to the kitchen counter and leaned against it. I flipped to the end of the contract, to the page with my parents’ signatures.
“Did you tie Dad up to get him to sign this?” I said, trying to lighten the uncomfortable silence.
“Why don’t you ask him?” my mother said evenly.
It hit me in the heart. She knew I’d barely spoken three words to Dad since I’d been home; I couldn’t meet his eyes. I’d disappointed him, and it seemed worse to me than anything Daniel could dream up.
