Brothers and Keepers

by John Edgar Wideman

  Stop. Stop, you stupid motherfucker.

  But the fence broke and ran and kept running deaf and dumb to everything except the pounding of his heart, the burning in his lungs, as he dashed crouching like a halfback the fifty feet from the empty rental truck to an office at one corner of his used-car lot. He’d heard the gun pop and pop again as he stumbled and scrambled to his feet but he kept running, tearing open the fatal shoulder wound he wasn’t even aware of yet. Kept running and kept pumping blood and pumping his arms and legs past the plate-glass windows of the office, past a boundary of plastic banners strung above one edge of the lot, out into the street, into traffic, waving his arms to get someone to stop. He made it two blocks up Greys Pond Road, dripping a trail of blood, staggering, stumbling, weaving up the median strip between four lanes of cars. No one wanted anything to do with a guy drunk or crazy enough to be playing in the middle of a busy highway. Only when he pitched face first and lay crumpled on the curb did a motorist pull over and come to his aid.

  Meanwhile, at the rear of the rental truck, a handful of money, coins, and wadded bills the dying man had flung down before he ran, lay on the asphalt between two groups of angry, frightened men. Black men. White men. No one in control. That little handful of chump change on the ground, not enough to buy two new Sonys at K Mart, a measure of the fence’s deception, proof of the game he intended to run on the black men, just as they’d planned their trick for him. There had to be more money somewhere, and somebody would have to pay for this mess, this bloody double double-cross; and the men stared across the money at each other too choked with rage and fear to speak.

  By Tuesday when Robby called, the chinook wind that had melted Sunday’s snow no longer warmed and softened the air. “Chinook” means “snow-eater,” and in the high plains country—Laramie sits on a plateau seven thousand feet above sea level—wind and sun can gobble up a foot of fresh snow from the ground in a matter of hours. The chinook had brought spring for a day, but just as rapidly as it appeared, the mellow wind had swept away, drawing in its wake arctic breezes and thick low-lying clouds. The clouds which had darkened the sky above the row of tacky, temporary-looking storefronts at the dying end of Third Street where Laramie Lanes hunkered.

  Hey, Big Bruh.

  Years since we’d spoken on the phone, but I had recognized Robby’s voice immediately. He’d been with me when I was writing Sunday, so my brother’s voice was both a shock and no surprise at all.

  Big Brother was not something Robby usually called me. But he’d chimed the words as if they went way back, as if they were a touchstone, a talisman, a tongue-in-cheek greeting we’d been exchanging for ages. The way Robby said “Big Bruh” didn’t sound phony, but it didn’t strike me as natural either. What I’d felt was regret, an instant, devastating sadness because the greeting possessed no magic. If there’d ever been a special language we shared, I’d forgotten it. Robby had been pretending. Making up a magic formula on the spot. Big Bruh. But that had been okay. I was grateful. Anything was better than dwelling on the sadness, the absence, better than allowing the distance between us to stretch further. . . .

  On my way to the bowling alley I began to ask questions I hadn’t considered till the phone rang. I tried to anticipate what I’d see outside Laramie Lanes. Would I recognize anyone? Would they look like killers? What had caused them to kill? If they were killers, were they dangerous? Had crime changed my brother into someone I shouldn’t bring near my house? I recalled Robby and his friends playing records, loud talking, giggling and signifying in the living room of the house on Marchand Street in Pittsburgh. Rob’s buddies had names like Poochie, Dulamite, Hanky, and Bubba. Just kids messing around, but already secretive, suspicious of strangers. And I had been a stranger, a student, foreign to the rhythms of their lives, their talk as I sat, home from college, in the kitchen talking to Robby’s mother. I’d have to yell into the living room sometimes. Ask them to keep the noise down so I could hear myself think. If I walked through the room, they’d fall suddenly silent. Squirm and look at each other and avoid my eyes. Stare at their own hands and feet mute as little speak-no-evil monkeys. Any question might get at best a nod or grunt in reply. If five or six kids were hanging out in the little living room they made it seem dark. Do wop, do wop forty-fives on the record player, the boys’ silence and lowered eyes conjuring up night no matter what time of the day I passed through the room.

  My father had called them thugs. Robby and his little thugs. The same word he’d used for me and my cut buddies when we were coming up, loafing around the house on Copeland Street, into playing records and bullshucking about girls, and saying nothing to nobody not part of our gang. Calling Rob’s friends thugs was my father’s private joke. Thugs not because they were incipient criminals or particularly bad kids, but because in their hip walks and stylized speech and caps pulled down on their foreheads they were declaring themselves on the lam, underground, in flight from the daylight world of nice, respectable adults.

  My father liked to read the Sunday funnies. In the “Nancy” comic strip was a character named Sluggo, and I believe that’s who my father had in mind when he called them thugs. That self-proclaimed little tough guy, snub-nosed, bristle-haired, knuckleheaded Sluggo. Funny, because like Sluggo they were dead serious about the role they were playing. Dead serious and fooling nobody. So my father had relegated them to the funny papers.

  Road grime caked the windows of the battered sedan parked outside the bowling alley. I couldn’t tell if anyone was inside. I let my motor run, talked to the ghost of my brother the way I’d talked that Sunday, waiting for a flesh-and-blood version to appear.

  Robby was a fugitive. My little brother was wanted for murder. For three months Robby had been running and hiding from the police. Now he was in Laramie, on my doorstep. Robbery. Murder. Flight. I had pushed them out of my mind. I hadn’t allowed myself to dwell on my brother’s predicament. I had been angry, hurt and afraid, but I’d had plenty of practice cutting myself off from those sorts of feelings. Denying disruptive emotions was a survival mechanism I’d been forced to learn early in life. Robby’s troubles could drive me crazy if I let them. It had been better to keep my feelings at a distance. Let the miles and years protect me. Robby was my brother, but that was once upon a time, in another country. My life was relatively comfortable, pleasant, safe. I’d come west to escape the demons Robby personified. I didn’t need outlaw brothers reminding me how much had been lost, how much compromised, how terribly the world still raged beyond the charmed circle of my life on the Laramie plains.

  In my Volvo, peering across the street, searching for a sign of life in the filthy car or the doorway of Laramie Lanes, pieces of my life rushed at me, as fleeting, as unpredictable as the clusters of cloud scudding across the darkening sky.

  Rob. Hey, Rob. Do you remember the time we were living on the third floor of Grandma’s house on Copeland Street and we were playing and Daddy came scooting in from behind the curtain where he and Mommy slept, dropping a trail of farts, blip, blip, blip, and flew out the door and down the steps faster than anybody’d ever made it before? I don’t know what he was doing or what we were doing before he came farting through the room, but I do remember the stunned silence afterward, the five of us kids looking at one another like we’d seen the Lone Ranger and wondering what the hell was that. Was that really Daddy? Were those sounds actual blipping farts from the actual behind of our actual father? Well, we sat on the floor, staring at each other, a couple seconds; then Tish laughed or I laughed. Somebody had to start it. A choked-back, closed-mouth, almost-swallowed, one-syllable laugh. And then another and another. As irresistible then as the farts blipping in a train from Daddy’s pursed behind. The first laugh sneaks out then it’s all hell bursting loose, it’s one pop after another, and mize well let it all hang out. We crack up and start to dance. Each one of us takes a turn being Edgar Wideman, big daddy, scooting like he did across the floor, fast but sneakylike till the first blip escapes and blow
s him into overdrive. Bip. Blap. Bippidy-bip. And every change and permutation of fart we can manufacture with our mouths, or our wet lips on the back of our hands, or a hand cupped in armpit with elbow pumping. A Babel of squeaky farts and bass farts and treble and juicy and atom-bomb and trip-hammer, machine-gun, suede, firecracker, slithery, bubble-gum-cracking, knuckle-popping, gone-with-the-wind menagerie of every kind of fart we can imagine. Till Mommy pokes her head from behind the curtain and says, That’s enough youall. But she can’t help grinning her ownself cause she had to hear it too. Daddy trailing that wedding-car tin-can tail of farts and skidding down the steps to the bathroom on the second floor where he slammed the door behind himself before the door on the third floor had time to swing shut. Mom’s smiling so we sputter one last fusillade and grin and giggle at each other one more time while she says again, That’s enough now, that’s enough youall.

  *

  Robby crossed Third Street alone, leaving his friends behind in the muddy car. I remember how glad I was to see him. How ordinary it seemed to be meeting him in this place he’d never been before. Here was my brother miraculously appearing from God-knows-where, a slim, bedraggled figure, looking very much like a man who’s been on the road for days, nothing like an outlaw or killer, my brother striding across the street to greet me. What was alien, unreal was not the man but the town, the circumstances that had brought him to this juncture. By the time Robby had reached my car and leaned down smiling into the open window, Laramie, robbery, murder, flight, my litany of misgivings had all disappeared.

  Rob rode with me from the bowling alley to the Harney Street house. Dukes and Johnny-Boy followed in the Olds. Rob told me Cecil Rice had split back to Pittsburgh to face the music. Johnny-Boy was somebody Robby and Mike had picked up in Utah.

  Robby and his two companions stayed overnight. There was eating, drinking, a lot of talk. Next day I taught my classes at the university and before I returned home in the afternoon, Robby and his crew had headed for Denver. My brother’s last free night was spent in Laramie, Wyoming. February 11, 1976, the day following their visit, Robby, Mike, and Johnny were arrested in Fort Collins, Colorado. The Oldsmobile they’d been driving had stolen plates. Car they’d borrowed in Utah turned out to be stolen too, bringing the FBI into the case because the vehicle and plates had been transported across state lines. The Colorado cops didn’t know the size of the fish in their net until they checked the FBI wire and suddenly realized they had some “bad dudes” in their lockup. “Niggers wanted for Murder One back East” was how one detective described the captives to a group of curious bystanders later, when Robby and Michael were being led, manacled, draped with chains, through the gleaming corridor of a Colorado courthouse.

  I can recall only a few details about Robby’s last night of freedom. Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner. Nobody as hungry as I thought they should be. Michael narrating a tale about a basketball scholarship he won to NYU, his homesickness, his ambivalence about the Apple, a coach he didn’t like whose name he couldn’t remember.

  Johnny-Boy wasn’t from Pittsburgh. Small, dark, greasy, he was an outsider who knew he didn’t fit, ill at ease in a middle-class house, the meandering conversations that had nothing to do with anyplace he’d been, anything he understood or cared to learn. Johnny-Boy had trouble talking, trouble staying awake. When he spoke at all, he stuttered riffs of barely comprehensible ghetto slang. While the rest of us were talking, he’d nod off. I didn’t like the way his heavy-lidded, bubble eyes blinked open and searched the room when he thought no one was watching him. Perhaps sleeping with one eye open was a habit forced upon him by the violent circumstances of his life, but what I saw when he peered from “sleep,” taking the measure of his surroundings, of my wife, my kids, me, were a stranger’s eyes, a stranger’s eyes with nothing in them I could trust.

  I should have understood why the evening was fragmentary, why I have difficulty recalling it now. Why Mike’s story was full of inconsistencies, nearly incoherent. Why Robby was shakier than I’d ever seen him. Why he was tense, weary, confused about what his next move should be. I’m tired, man, he kept saying. I’m tired. . . . You don’t know what it’s like, man. Running . . . running. Never no peace. Certain signs were clear at the time but they passed right by me. I thought I was giving my guests a few hours’ rest from danger, but they knew I was turning my house into a dangerous place. I believed I was providing a respite from pursuit. They knew they were leaving a trail, complicating the chase by stopping with me and my family. A few “safe” hours in my house weren’t long enough to come down from the booze, dope, and adrenaline high that fueled their flight. At any moment my front door could be smashed down. A gunfire fight begin. I thought they had stopped, but they were still on the road. I hadn’t begun to explore the depths of my naïveté, my bewilderment.

  Only after two Laramie Police Department detectives arrived at dawn on February 12, a day too late to catch my brother, and treated me like a criminal, did I know I’d been one. Aiding and abetting a fugitive. Accessory after the fact to the crime of first-degree murder. The detectives hauled me down to the station. Demanded that I produce an alibi for the night a convenience store had been robbed in Utah. Four black men had been involved. Three had been tentatively identified, which left one unaccounted for. I was black. My brother was a suspect. So perhaps I was the fourth perpetrator. No matter that I lived four hundred miles from the scene of the crime. No matter that I wrote books and taught literature and creative writing at the university. I was black. Robby was my brother. Those unalterable facts would always incriminate me.

  Robby passed through Laramie briefly and continued on his way. That’s about it. I wished for more, then and now. Most of what I can recall makes the evening of his visit seem bland, uneventful, though an incident in Jamila’s room, beside her crib, is an exception. That and the moment I watched Robby’s shoulders disappear down the hallway stairs to the kids’ playroom, where a roll-away cot and some extra mattresses had been set out for sleeping. Those moments imprinted. I’ll carry the sounds and sights to my grave.

  I’d been alone with my brother a few minutes in the kitchen, then in the hall outside Jamila’s room. I advised him to stay in Laramie a few days, catch his breath, unwind. Warned him about the shoot-em-up mentality of Western cops, the subtle and not-so-subtle racism of the region. How three black men in a car would arouse suspicion anytime, anywhere they stopped.

  Little else to say. I started a thousand conversations inside my head. None was appropriate, none addressed Robby’s anguish, his raw nerves. He was running, he was afraid, and nothing anyone said could bring the dead man in Pittsburgh back to life. I needed to hear Robby’s version of what had happened. Had there been a robbery, a shooting? Why? Why?

  In our first private moment since I’d picked him up at Laramie Lanes, as we stood outside the baby’s room, my questions never got asked. Too many whys. Why did I want to know? Why was I asking? Why had this moment been so long in coming? Why was there a murdered man between us, another life to account for, now when we had just a few moments alone together? Perhaps Robby did volunteer a version of the crime. Perhaps I listened and buried what I heard. What I remember is telling him about the new baby. In the hall, then in her room, when we peeked in and discovered her wide awake in her crib, I recounted the events surrounding her birth.

  Jamila. Her name means “beautiful” in Arabic. Not so much outer good looks as inner peace, harmony. At least that’s what I’ve been told. Neither Judy nor I knew the significance of the name when we chose it. We just liked the sound. It turns out to fit perfectly.

  Your new niece is something else. Beautiful inside and out. Hard to believe how friendly and calm she is after all she’s been through. You’re the first one from home to see her.

  I didn’t tell my brother the entire story. We’d need more time. Anyway, Judy should fill in the gory details. In a way it’s her story. I’d almost lost them both, wife and daughter. Judy had earned the r
ight to tell the story. Done the bleeding. She was the one who nearly died giving birth.

  Besides, on that night eight years ago I wasn’t ready to say what I felt. The incidents were too close, too raw. The nightmare ride behind an ambulance, following it seventy miles from Fort Collins to Denver. Not knowing, the whole time, what was happening inside the box of flashing lights that held my wife. Judy’s water had broken just after a visit to a specialist in Fort Collins. Emergency procedures were necessary because she had developed placenta previa, a condition that could cause severe hemorrhaging in the mother and fatal prematurity for her baby. I had only half listened to the doctor’s technical explanation of the problem. Enough to know it could be life-threatening to mother and infant. Enough to picture the unborn child trapped in its watery cell. Enough to get tight-jawed at the irony of nature working against itself, the shell of flesh and blood my woman’s body had wrapped round our child to protect and feed it also blocking the exit from her womb. Placenta previa meant a child’s only chance for life was cesarian section, with all the usual attendant risks extremely heightened.

  Were the technicians in the back of the ambulance giving blood, taking blood? Were they administering oxygen to my wife? To our child? Needles, tubes, a siren wailing, the crackle of static as the paramedics communicated with doctors in Denver. Had the fetus already been rushed into the world, flopping helpless as a fish because its lungs were still too much like gills to draw breath from the air?

  A long, bloody birth in Denver. Judy on the table three and a half hours. Eight pints of blood fed into her body as eight pints seeped out into a calibrated glass container beside the operating table. I had watched it happening. Tough throughout the cutting, the suturing, the flurries of frantic activity, the appearance of the slick, red fetus, the snipping of the umbilical, the discarding of the wet, liverish-looking, offending bag, tough until near the end when the steady ping, ping, ping of blood dripping into the jar loosened the knot of my detachment and my stomach flip-flopped once uncontrollably, heaving up bile to the brim of my throat. Had to get up off the stool then, step back from the center of the operating room, gulp fresh air.