The Weight of Glass

by Stuart Heatherington

  “Lee, Lee, Lee.” I heard the contempt, the bitter shape of his words, sharp as a knife.

  My brother reeled around, arm ripping free of Mr. Tucker’s grasp. “Keep your hands off me.”

  The preacher straightened his vest. Removing a pocket watch from a small flap, he snapped open the lid and gazed inside its cover, then peered up at the storm clouds, eyes a cold rage of veins as he replaced his timepiece.

  “You’ll wanna be nice to me, boy.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Don’t go gettin’ stupid on me. I know you ain’t dumb.”

  I saw my brother staring down the side of the house. And from where I sat I couldn’t tell if he was looking for help or looking to run.

  “I’m not sure I follow—”

  Mr. Tucker slapped his hand against the side of Lee's head. “Are you afflicted? Cause I can heal that.”

  Lee stumbled sideways into the house, hand bracing against the foundation to stay up.

  Mr. Tucker didn't wait for an answer. “You’d do good to get them ears open, boy. Learn to watch your mouth in my presence. By God, I’m the good shepherd, son. You understand me?”

  I put my hand over my mouth to stifle a cry.

  Lee said nothing.

  Mr. Tucker struck him again over the ear, this time, not with a slap, but with a closed Bible. It came out of nowhere.

  I flinched at the resounding thud that dropped my brother, gasping, on his knees.

  He snatched Lee's head by the hair, violently shaking him upward and saying, “What’s the matter, you at a loss for words, sinner?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Let me set you straight on something,” Mr. Tucker said. “She won’t believe you. That what you’re thinking? Go running into your mama and excite her with all your stories. But it won’t work. Do you know why?”

  Lee jerked his head to the side, but Mr. Tucker held a solid knot of hair in his fist. “Preachers don’t talk like you.”

  My own neck stiffened, joints like baked concrete in the sun.

  “Don’t you get it? They’re false prophets. But I am the word, I am the way. Now, I want you to focus your mind real good. Focus and tell me the lesson.”

  I couldn’t see my brother’s face, but I could hear him crying. The sound made my bladder weak. I shook as I pinched my legs to make it go away.

  Lee’s voice cracked finally, “Because I’m too young.”

  “Damn straight, you’re too young. And as your new daddy, I’m gonna love you, Lee. In that you will know the truth. The first book of John says, ‘There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is perfected in love.’ Know what that means?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I will spill your blood to have you believe in me. So you take care to be nice to your new daddy, sinner. Awful damn nice.”

  I swallowed what felt like a hundred marbles when I heard that. Then, as quickly as he'd been cruel, he was again matter-of-fact, if not entirely personable.

  He extended his hand and pulled Lee to his feet, brushing off his shirt and straightening his clothing. When done, he removed a comb from his pocket and forced it on my brother, saying flatly, “Fix your hair. And if you ever play that kind of game with me again…” He patted the wall of the house. “There are worse things than that. I can promise you.”

  Mr. Tucker took back the comb, gathered Lee's shoulder in his grip and walked out of sight toward the front of the house.

  Six hours later, my mother’s hand in marriage delivered us into the flock of the Good Shepherd forever.

  3

  The tight stitch of an erection reminded me of the dream. I used my hand to push it back into my underwear and reached over to the night table. A bottle of Jack Daniels sat under the lamp, half of it wasted earlier on the porch. I twisted the top off and brought it to my lips. It burned for only a second.

  Pain shot through my knee as I stood up. It brought on a flashback of my brother, Paul’s handcuffs lunging at me. My back locked up with the chill it brought on. Shit never goes away.

  Moving across the room, I slid the glass door to the side and stumbled for the deck railing. In the distance, the sound of waves emerged out of the dark in a sigh and finished as the grumblings of some old man. I pulled myself free from my boxers and pissed through the slats.

  Inside, I trekked to the kitchen and found an apple in one of the bags by the cooler. I took a bite, rested it on the counter and stared over into the living room. Amy’s manuscript lay on top of the coffee table, its pages fraying at the corners where I’d read through it last night. I wished I had forgotten it in the car.

  What did you read it for, dumbass? “Nobody put a gun to your head.”

  It offered a refresher course on the uglier side of growing up. I should have left it alone, because if the first thirty pages scared the shit out of me, the rest gave me nightmares. Maybe that explained my sister’s reminder in the dream. He hurt me, Lee. And I let him. Did you see it? Did you even know?

  “I wasn’t there, goddamnit!” The apple rolled off the counter behind me as I ran across the room and side armed the damned thing against the door. A clatter of pages poured out of its broken spine. Standing there, I watched a flurry of paper spill out on the floor. “Fuck you.”

  I spun around toward the kitchen and grabbed the trashcan. On hands and knees, I fought with the mess. Damage control waited in the carport. At the bottom of the stairs, I threw open the grill lid and turned out the book on a charred grate. For a second, I stood back and observed the wreck of pages.

  “Suck it.”

  I flipped the gas knobs to high and dropped the top. The smell of gas leaked out of the sides of the grill and hit my nose as I pushed the igniter. Flames leapt from under the base in a loud whump. I stepped back, crackles and ash spilling out of what holes it could find as my eyes turned to slits over the searing vapor.

  Sitting on the steps, I listened to the tune of the fire. The sound was hollow and distant in the ears. And like rocks dropped in a well, they played an entirely different tune from the one in my memory.

  *****

  July of 1994 - The sun slowed its march to the west, leaving the pinks and rich amber colors I loved as a boy, masking the first stars of nightfall. Amy and I walked barefoot in the warm surf of Fripp, bellies exhausted on oysters and crab. The taste of the low country filled our heads. By the second bottle of wine, we were drunk.

  We spent most of the week successfully avoiding our past. Like well paid plastic surgeons, we fixed only the things on the surface. The ones which made us smile.

  “You haven’t spoken to him still?”

  I chuckled, shaking my head. “I’ve been tied up since he graduated last March.”

  “Don’t be funny, Lee.”

  “What’s funny is the fact that our worthless piece-of-shit brother calls me once a week, begging for cigarettes and cash, when he’s stuck in the joint. But stamp his parole papers and he forgets my number. Maybe he’s too busy circling want ads.”

  “Be serious,” Amy said.

  “Hell, I am. I swear on every one of Paul’s employment chances.” I slung a shell out into the ocean. “And, no, not since his parole. I wouldn’t care if he came begging at Thanksgiving, I wouldn’t give him the dark meat.”

  “He wouldn’t eat it anyway.” Amy’s mouth curled into a smile.

  I followed the movement of her hand as she swiped her hair back behind an ear and said, “How can one man have so much hate built up inside of him?”

  “And you didn’t,” she pointed out.

  “I had hate aplenty, sweetheart. I was a regular card carrying member of the IFHWTC.”

  Amy turned to face me. “IFHW…what?”

  “IFHWTC.” I spelled it out nice and slow. “The I Fucking Hate Warren Tucker Club. If I remember, I started the official campaign drive. Hell, I was its inaugural president.”

  She laughed. “Yo
u were its only member.”

  “My solemn duties to uphold the office kept me off the recruiting trail. Or else I would have sworn you in as my Joint Chief of Staff.”

  “I would have been honored.” She bowed before me in the tide, too drunk for her legs.

  I grabbed her arm when she almost fell over saluting me.

  “Well, it’s not too late,” I said. “Annual dues are practically nothing. We’re a society of cheap bureaucrats, founded on worthless principles.”

  “Those are the best kind. Where do I sign up?”

  “Okay, raise your right hand and repeat after me.”

  “Your other right hand,” I said, easing her left hand back to her side.

  “Oopsy.” She giggled and nearly fell again in the surf swapping them out.

  “I, Amy Macon.”

  The wine wreaked havoc on her words. “I, Amy Macon.”

  “Do hereby accept all the duties imposed by the secret society of Warren haters.”

  “You just make that up?”

  “Say it.”

  “Do hereby blah de dah dah…I do.”

  “Welcome to the club.” I lifted her up out of the water and spun her around in drunken circles. Cold salt water soaked my pants and eventually I lost my balance, sending both us toppling over into waist high waves that drowned out our delight.

  She pulled her wet hair to the side and rung it out. “I propose as our first order of business that we change the name of the club.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Our first session’s called to order. I’ll recognize the distinguished lady with the wet ass.”

  “Thanks for noticing. The floor nominates the name of the club be changed in lieu of the events surrounding this evening.”

  “The nomination’s recognized. What would be the suggestion for the new club name?”

  “WFHWTC, the We Fucking Hate Warren Tucker Club.” Amy clapped her hands like we were changing the world.

  I looked around at the empty beach. “I guess I have to second that nomination. All in favor say aye.”

  Two ayes went up into the night, mixed under a thick spray of salt air.

  “Amazing, it carried a unanimous vote, and not one official had to be bribed.”

  When we dragged our wet bodies out of the ocean, we laid up on the beach; night sky etched in a kaleidoscope of brilliant stars. I propped my knees up and licked the beading salt water away from my lips.

  “You know something? Paul’s what he is today because of that bastard.”

  “It doesn’t give him permission to be a racist.”

  She turned to me then, eyes softening in the thin light. “Do you hate him, Lee?”

  A part of me did. “I hate certain things about him. When he marched through Bascomb with that goddamned sign partitioned to his chest like he was a living billboard for the mentally impaired assholes of America. I hated that.”

  “You’re like a poet.”

  What the hell ever. “It’s the damned truth. I know there’s a part of him that doesn’t like me—has never liked me probably—but, I mean, for Christ’s sake, we’re brothers. Oh, wait my mistake, that doesn’t mean shit to dear ol’ Pauly boy, keeper of all that’s stupid and mindless. What am I thinking?”

  “You weren’t there the last few years like I was.”

  “I was there enough to know I got the shit beat out of me plenty. But I don’t run around setting crosses on fire in front of black folks’ homes or trot on down to the local Salvation Army, looking for white sheets that’ll knock ’em dead at the local Klan rally,” I said. “For the most part, I’m normal.”

  Amy prodded me in the arm. “Don’t push your luck.”

  We climbed to our feet and turned back down the beach. Night clouds hung like a pale fog far out to sea. I breathed in the wonder of it. Amy’s hand entwined mine, and I glanced at her watching the darkened horizon. We looked nothing like sister and brother except for when we smiled. That singular trait, if it could even be called one, stood as the only thing capable of passing us off as children born of the same womb.

  Up on the porch, the warm reflection of the ocean cast itself like a net on the windowpanes. I stood before it and peered through my image and the image of the world behind me. I could see my daughter, Charlie, all but nine-years-old, still asleep on the couch. She hadn’t moved from the time we left.

  Two cold Michelob rested in one hand when I laid stake to the redwood chair on the porch. I passed one of the bottles to Amy. A cigarette ember crept closer to her face in a puzzle of orange shadows and knotted towel. I took a swig of beer and closed my eyes, not caring how drunk the night was leading up to. Tomorrow’s hangover was tomorrow’s hangover. I’d deal with it then.

  The sound of Amy crying stirred me out of the darkness.

  “You okay?”

  Her hand turned over and wavered in the air. “I like to think I’m fine, but I don’t get what that means anymore.”

  “Is it work?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s the only thing that keeps me sane.” Amy pulled at the cigarette, using the towel to wipe her face dry. “How’s Charlie doing?”

  I cocked my eyes back at the door. “Asleep on the couch.”

  “She’s a sweet girl. Loves her Daddy more than anything.”

  “I tried to give her a good home.”

  She nodded. “Anything was better than ours.”

  Her words stuck like a claw hammer into the base of my neck. If they could have buried themselves in my head they would. I sat there, uncomfortably numb, as flashes of faces reeled off in my mind like some terrible camera blurring over into shades of gray. A hush filled the porch for the longest time.

  “How did we survive our childhood?” The majority of my tongue had grown thick and heavy.

  “Would you call us survivors?”

  “I’d call us ingenious rebels,” I lied, knowing the truth.

  “That might work for you, big brother. You lived in the woods as much as a boy possibly could. I know it was you who rode out to the church on his bike and let the air out of the Good Shepherd’s tires every other day. And I also suspect you got him fired. Lee, the great saboteur,” she said, as though I were a saint she prayed to.

  I measured the distance to the ocean with my eyes. “You’ve got me confused with the wrong kid.”

  “See there…you and your secrets. You knew how to keep them. I’ll give you that. But I belong in the survivor category. And every morning I’m reminded in the mirror that nothing will change that,” Amy said, almost on the verge of tears again. “Even when I don’t think I can anymore, she’s always there.”

  My mouth dried out, one big, rusty socket, as I watched her graceful shoulders sink a part. She stood up and walked to the railing. “Who, Amy?”

  “The little girl.” Her voice collapsed under a crash of waves.

  Something in her words scared the shit out of me. The way telling campfire stories about a desperate child lost in the woods, raised the flesh on your back. “What little girl?”

  “The one in the mirrors,” she said, “the one that looks like me. She’s covered like a disease. Never goes away. All the horrible bruises and blood coming out of—”

  She shook her hands violently, as if flinging something from her skin. The glass bottle between my legs hit the floor as I jerked forward out of my seat. I grabbed her arms, pinning her against me.

  “Easy does it.”

  After several minutes, she pulled away and sat down in the chair again.

  She lit a fresh cigarette and stared at its tip, lost in the glow. “Can I tell you something?”

  “Anything. You know that.”

  She glanced up. “I almost killed myself before I came down here.”

  My mouth caved open in total surprise, and I sat motionless, like someone snapped their fingers and bound me in place.

  “Don’t look at me that way. My doctor gave me a script of Xanax—which is good stuff, I might add—and for about a week I went
through the motions.”

  “Amy—”

  “I’m not done,” she said, and placed a finger against my lips. “You should know I’ve had a lot of close calls, too. But this was the first time in a long while.”

  I brought my hands up to my face. Through the gap of my fingers, I fixed on her. “How long?”