“That can’t happen,” I said.
She sighed. “You’re probably right.”
“No ‘probably’ about it. It can’t happen. You can’t let it happen.”
“What can I do?”
Maybe ten days later she called again.
“Guess who’s here?” she said abruptly, with forced cheer.
Mary and I had been laughing on the couch when the phone rang; whatever happened to my face after “Guess who’s here?” alarmed her: Had somebody died?
“That’s right!” said my mother, though I hadn’t said a word. “He’s right here! You want to speak to him?”
“No.”
“Here he is!”
“. . . Zwieb?”
In the midst of my dizzy epiphany—but of course this was going to happen—I couldn’t muster much in the way of warmth, dissembled or otherwise. I said hi and asked what he planned to do with himself. He mentioned something about his lawsuit and I told him he was full of shit. Just like that. I think Scott tried to laugh it off, but I made it clear I wasn’t trying to be funny.
“Lawsuit,” I said. “What about getting a job?”
“I might do some copy-editing. I was making damn good money there for a while, Zwieb. You have a pretty distorted idea of what my life was like.”
“Even the most reprehensible people,” I said, quoting one of my letters, “can’t be reprehensible every minute of the day. That would require a certain effort.”
He gave an edgy laugh. “Watch it, Zwieb.”
“Does Papa know you’re out yet?”
“Papa,” he said. “Papa’s been trying to get rid of me ever since I was seventeen.”
He said this with an intensity that was supposed to be persuasive, like a bad actor reciting a silly line.
“Okay, Scott. Can I speak to Mom, please?”
He tried to talk a bit longer, to win me over, but I kept asking for our mother until he gave her the phone.
“Okay, Mom,” I said. “Okay.” I could barely catch my breath. “You’re going to have to live with this.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means he’s crazy. It means you’ve got a crazy alcoholic drug addict—”
“He can’t drink while he’s here!” she announced decisively. “That’s the deal! Two beers a day! That’s it!”
“Right. You heard what he said about Papa?”
“What?”
I told her.
“Well, maybe he’s right,” she said.
I’d been pacing from one room to the other, back and forth, but now I sat down on the floor.
“I mean we have to have a little faith in him!” she was saying. “Maybe he’s not entirely wrong! Somebody has to believe in him!”
I told her I’d call her back in a few days and hung up. Mary was stooped beside me patting my head, which annoyed me. She asked if I wanted to talk about it.
“Scott’s out of prison,” I said. “He’s living with my mother. And no, I don’t want to talk about it right at the moment.”
THAT WAS OCTOBER 1998—Scott had just turned thirty-eight—and my mother and I spoke only a few more times between then and Christmas. We knew we’d only fight over the phone, and there was no point in that; she’d made her decision and now it would have to work out one way or the other. In letters she tried to put the best spin on things: in exchange for room and board, Scott had agreed to do chores around the place—feed animals, mow grass, weed the garden, that sort of thing—and for a few weeks, all seemed to go well. Scott was not only a hardy farmhand but a pleasant undemanding companion. At night they sat around chatting, watching TV; sometimes he gave her backrubs. I wondered in my letters how this spirit of almost ideal amity had been achieved, since I’d never known them to last five minutes without going for each other’s throats. My mother replied that Scott was a new man now that he’d stopped drinking so much. Two beers a day, she insisted, and “by God he sticks to it.”
More and more often, however, a minor chord was struck. One night Scott had gone to a concert and returned very late, waking my mother with a lot of crashing around in the kitchen. He was totally incoherent. But the next morning (or whenever he got out of bed), Scott had an explanation: he’d forgotten to eat the day of the concert, he said, and therefore his blood sugar was parlously low. My mother reported this without a whiff of irony; rather she invited me to share her relief. Also he began to neglect his chores. Given that he had little else to do, this seemed an almost spiteful idleness; when confronted, though, he’d only shake his head in a wondering way and remark, “Oh yeah. Sorry. Well, I’ll do it tomorrow.” Tomorrow, it soon transpired, meant whenever he felt like it or whenever my mother was willing to risk a fight by putting her foot down. At first she was able to keep somewhat calm by reminding herself that Scott’s short-term memory wasn’t what it used to be.
But at last she threw in the towel.
“It’s not working out,” she said when we spoke a couple of days before I came home for Christmas. That my mother would admit this, to me, meant things had gone very wrong indeed.
“What’s going on?”
She mentioned his indolence and so forth. Then, more reluctantly, she admitted he was drinking again and this made things “pretty bad.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know. Pretty bad.” She gave an odd chuckle, sighed. “You can’t mention this when you come here . . .”
“Mention what?”
“Promise?”
“Tell me.”
The fact was, Scott had assaulted her the night before. He’d come home drunk and they’d fought as usual. Finally my mother told him to get the hell out of her house, and he laughed or affected to laugh: “You were nothing but a lonely old cunt before I came here,” he said. He put his face in hers and invited her to hit him; at first she hesitated, but he goaded her on with a voice, a face, that was so repulsive she had to lash out; just as suddenly he rammed a knee in her groin and left her writhing on the floor.
“Call the police!” I said.
“I can’t do that.”
“Fine. I’ll call them. Better yet, I’ll kill that fucker myself.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t talk like that. Listen, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Today he didn’t even remember.”
“Right, and he won’t remember the next time either, or the time after that, and before you know it he’ll kill you. You have to get him out of there. Today.”
But she insisted we wait until Christmas was over. “And don’t worry,” she said. “He’ll move out on his own. He doesn’t want to live with me either. I’m just a ‘lonely old cunt’ who nags him all day and won’t let him drink. Let’s just try to get through Christmas, okay?” Then she told me how much she missed me and her voice broke. Only two more days, I said.
SCOTT PICKED ME up at the Oklahoma City airport, since our mother had invited some friends for lunch and had to stay home and cook. I saw him before he saw me. There in the crowded baggage area he burned with a kind of lunatic charisma—eyes wide, head bobbing, bounding around on his toes: a jaybird looking for a worm. I could picture the grainy surveillance footage later, a lighted circle around Scott—the man who went on to blow up the terminal, shoot randomly into the crowd, kill his mother and brother and himself.
He spotted me and bounded over. I dropped my bag and went limp to absorb the pummeling.
“Zwiebathane!” he said, after he’d set me back on my feet. Scott was at least two inches taller but not as bulky as I’d become in my thirties; one reason for his rough greetings, I always thought, was to establish that he was still the stronger of the two. Also, of course, he loved me and was low on impulse control.
While we waited for the rest of my luggage, Scott talked and talked. He told me about his hepatitis C as if for the first time, having evidently forgotten the times he’d mentioned it in his letters. He seemed perfectly at ease with it.
“. . . oh fuck yeah, Zwie
b, in those days you used the same dirty needle for days at a time! Just a bunch of kids.” Worldly chuckle. “I remember once Todd and I had this shit . . .”
“Really?” I’d say, or “Wow” or “Hm,” and when I’d hear Scott bark with sudden laughter, I’d laugh a bit too. Finally my luggage arrived. Scott plucked it off the belt and bounded toward the parking lot, talking, talking.
The roads were icy, but Scott drove his old BMW fast as ever. I clutched the armrests and watched the scenery unfurl while he jabbered away. There was the lumbering oil derrick on Airport Road, the blank pastures of I-44, abruptly giving way to an ever-changing farrago of strip malls and franchise restaurants, then pasture again as we sped (wobbling a bit on the icy exit ramp) away from I-35 into the rural hinterland east of Norman. A few years later, the singer Toby Keith would erect a sprawling mansion on some land near my mother’s place, but in those days it was just trees and cattle and the odd country church, all of it jumbling past while Scott talked and talked. He’d always prided himself on his ability to maneuver under adverse conditions, and now he was taking turns at top speed with only a touch of tailspin, or coming to a slippery stop in the nick of time—talking, talking. From the moment I’d spotted Scott at the airport I was sorry I’d come, and now, thirty minutes later, I was sorrier than ever.
“. . . that’s going into my lawsuit!” he proclaimed at a stoplight.
“Let’s not talk about that, okay?”
It was the first thing I’d said in a while, and we were both startled by the anger in my voice.
“About what?”
“Your ‘lawsuit.’ ”
His eyes narrowed on the road and he said, “Fine.”
The talking stopped.
At last we arrived at my mother’s house. While Scott skidded along the wavering gravel driveway, I was thinking how unsuitable the place was for housing a lunatic: the nearest neighbors were perhaps a quarter mile away, and the rustling woods would drown our screams.
Hearing the dogs bark, my mother came out to greet me. From a distance I thought she looked great—thinner than I’d seen her in years. Then I saw how haggard she was. By then Scott had been living with her for more than two months. She hugged me and wouldn’t let go. I tried a bit of levity—“Hey, thanks for sending Scott to get me”—but she only clutched me harder and shook her head against my chest. “I had to cook,” she said in a tragic voice. We walked arm-in-arm back to the house, Scott bounding ahead with my luggage.
Our guests had already arrived, an old couple named Younghein and their middle-aged daughter. My mother had met the Youngheins some thirty years ago at a “discussion group” in the suburbs; they were nice folks who made a hobby of various left-wing causes. Mrs. Younghein was the crankier of the two: when I was a kid, she’d dragged me along to an anti-nuke rally at the capitol, and nowadays her cause was the pollution associated with chicken farms. Shrunken with age and various diseases, she held forth on the subject while her husband smiled benignly. Every few minutes she’d lapse into a pettish silence and chew her food, exhausted, whereupon the daughter would start chatting about her travels. It was very dull, but I welcomed dullness after my ride with Scott.
They knew about his troubles, of course, and Scott knew they knew. Every little gesture of his was calculated with this in mind. He was elaborately well-mannered and spoke with a kind of fussy Latinate pretension (indubitably), alert to the effect he was having on the rest of us.
Later we sat around the living room drinking coffee and talking about the past. Scott was still at the table having a soul chat with the daughter. (Perhaps she was telling him—at my mother’s behest?—about an obstacle she’d overcome in her own life.) Old Mrs. Younghein had talked herself out about chicken farms and wasn’t much interested in reminiscing. She sat slumped in her chair, dazed and gloomy.
“We need to go!” she’d croak from time to time, and my mother would tell her it was early and Mr. Younghein would pat her arm in a mollifying way.
I wondered why my mother was dragging this out. Once upon a time she’d been so impatient with bores and boredom—but then so many of her colorful old friends, the funny gay men and so forth, were gone forever. Life had come full circle or something . . . or so I reflected, casting about for a talking point, when one of Scott’s laughs split the air and it occurred to me that the Youngheins made my mother feel safe. Nothing very bad could happen around such dull, decent people. If nothing else Scott would put off getting drunk.
Finally, as night fell, they left. Mr. Younghein and I stood on either side of his wife and helped her totter over the gravel while the daughter gave my brother a hug and urged him to call her anytime: “I mean that, Scott: anytime.” I waved good-bye to our guests, confident I’d never see them again, and wandered back inside to some bookshelves along the hall. I was through being sociable. I meant to grab a few of my mother’s photo albums and retire to a back room to ponder our family saga.
“HEY ZWIEB.”
I’d gone through a few albums and had skulked back into the hall to grab some more, when Scott (lying in wait?) rounded the corner with a large, half-empty glass of beer in his hand. Already there was a subtle change in his manner: he breathed in careful, hissing doses and stood a bit more formally than before.
“How d’you like being a teacher?”
Whenever he’d asked me this in the past, I’d always said “Fine” and added some sort of disclaimer about the pain-in-the-ass principal or pain-in-the-ass parents—this to make him feel better about lacking any professional status himself. Now I said something about the pain-in-the-ass kids, how thirteen is a difficult age and so on.
“Thirteen,” Scott said huskily. He gave me a little push. “Hey Zwieb, you ever fuck one of your students?”
“No,” I said.
“Man.” He shook his head and sipped his beer. “Thirteen.”
I excused myself and proceeded to the back room. Shut the door. Sat in the gathering dusk. After a while I turned on a lamp and realized I’d forgotten to grab more photo albums; since their retrieval would mean leaving the room and possibly bumping into Scott again, I picked up a book from the lamp table and tried to read. By now Scott and my mother were having a loud discussion in the living room; I could hear bits and pieces if I listened. Most of what Scott said, as ever when he was drunk or getting that way, was liberally sprinkled with the word “fuck” in various forms.
“Fuck that,” I heard him say. “If you fucking think I’m getting a job, then you don’t fucking know the first thing about me!”
He didn’t sound particularly aggressive. Rather he seemed amused by the fact that, after all these years, our mother still didn’t understand him.
“But what will you do?”
“I’ve always gotten by, you don’t have to fucking worry about it.”
“But I’m curious, Scott. You can’t stay here forever.”
“I don’t need your . . .”
What I mostly noticed was the pains our mother took not to provoke him: she kept him going with ingenuous little questions and sometimes laughed at his answers, careful to make it clear she was laughing with rather than at him. After all these years she was finally afraid of him; also, I think, she wanted to keep him engaged so he wouldn’t bother me. She wanted me to enjoy my visit.
But after a while it petered out—his chair gave a loud creak as he lurched to his feet and my mother sighed “Not another beer, Scott, please”—and sure enough he paid me a visit. He stood in the corner of the room wearing briefs and an olive-drab T-shirt.
“. . . and I just want to grab that fucker by the scruff of his neck” (he was talking about a celebrated wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys who’d recently had a number of setbacks related to an incorrigible cocaine habit), “and say ‘Listen, you stupid nigger: Stop acting like a fucking six-year-old and get off your pathetic lazy ass and get your shit together’ . . .”
This from a guy who’d taken more than his share of drugs and on
ly minutes before had laughed at the idea of ever getting a job. In the past I would have assayed some witticism or pointed remark—“I can think of any number of people who’d benefit from such advice”—but this time I hesitated, too bemused or perhaps intimidated to speak. I wondered if my brother picked up on the irony and was daring me to be a smartass about it. But I don’t think so. I don’t think any irony occurred to him. Anyway, he broadened his attack to include black people in general.
“Face it, Zwieb, niggers are despicable. It’s all about who’s the biggest pimp and who’s fucked the most bitches and, you know, killed the most people.”
I was sorry to hear Scott say this. One of his most endearing traits had always been a steadfast sympathy for black people and anyone else who was treated unfairly by the world. His hero (with John Lennon) had been Muhammad Ali at a time when I myself thought the man was a cocky bastard who needed to get his head knocked off. Granted I was a child, but Scott was only a little older and his friends felt the same way I did.
I said that it was more a question of class than race. I pointed out that my own black students were mostly middle-class and pretty much indistinguishable from their white counterparts, which wasn’t strictly true but I thought it best not to get bogged down in nuance.
“I mean racism is pretty cretinous, Scott. I hope it’s just a passing phase.”
He stood swaying a bit in his underwear, thinking it over, and I glanced wistfully at my book. Finally he gulped the dregs of his beer and daintily smacked his lips as though he were drinking it just for the taste, then squeezed my shoulder a bit too hard and left the room.
THE NEXT MORNING he was full of beans. I’d slept on the couch in the living room—the spare bedroom was taken by Scott and his things—and I awoke to the huff and thump of jumping jacks. It was very cold outside, and Scott wore a stocking cap but no shirt. He was in good shape, remarkably so for a drunk, but then he’d always had better muscle tone than I.
The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait Page 18
