Farewell Navigator

by Leni Zumas

  Our parents were the same height—they matched. They traded off reading us bedtime stories, and neither minded reading the same story again and again. Either could fix a fine egg-and tomato sandwich on short notice. Our mother was better at dancing and driving, and our father had a better sense of humor. Our mother was good at comforting our father when he cried, all those nights when he sat on the couch holding his cheeks, weeping, grunting, shaking his head, and she told us to go to our rooms. Whenever we asked was Dad all right, Mom would say, Sure, goslings, he’s just feeling sad today.

  After his funeral, we moved from the city to a town so tiny we were able to count its stoplights on two hands. This town is small but not quaint or friendly. The first time Horace got charged with a drunk and disorderly, in front of one of the two local bars, policemen held his face against a brick wall and tapped the back of his head with a flashlight.

  We do this a little harder, one cop said, guess what happens to your brains? Smash-o! and the other cop laughed.

  Smash-o? Horace repeated afterward, with disdain. What the fuck kind of word is that?

  I watched him fiddle with the gauze reddening on his cheek and forehead. It’s hard to get bandages to stay fixed on a mouth, so his broken-open lips just went ahead and bled.

  Feel like making out? he asked, lurching at me.

  Our mother worries first about self-harm and second—a close second—about the fact that Horace refuses to work. Her daughter, at least, has a job, the same job for several years running, even if it’s not a very interesting one. Her son hasn’t had a job in a year and a half, and she is getting a bit tired, frankly, of supplementing the income he makes from selling blood. He sells it as often as they let him, but blood money doesn’t go too far. Neither does the cash he gets from being a volunteer for medical tests that turn his feces white. Mom pays most of his bills and I accuse her of gross enabling.

  Better to enable than have him move back in with me, she answers. That really took its toll.

  She likes us to attend Sunday dinner at her house, because it reminds her of television shows where families eat together on Sundays with gusto and ceremony. Ladling sauced beef onto macaroni, she asks how our respective weeks have gone.

  Horace spears a finger of meat and lifts it up for inspection.

  I announce, They might put me in charge of planning the new vacation-package campaign.

  That’s great, goose. To where?

  Central Asia.

  Horace burbles, An enchanting travel destination, to be sure. All the crime, the heat, and the outdoor plumbing you could ask for! What’s your brochure gonna say—Visit Kyrgyzstan, because it’s cheaper than Belgium?

  I, for one, am proud of you, Mom says. It’s an exciting opportunity.

  If you want exciting, says my brother, you should’ve seen my class this week. Man, I’m telling you—the action never stops. First we’ve got a roller-coaster ride of a story entitled “The Final Waltz,” the heartwarming saga of a woman who slow dances with her Alzheimer’s-ravaged husband. Really innovative material, and so freshly imagined—nary a cliché in sight! Next we’re treated to the joy of “Oops I Did It Again and Again,” a comical look at twenty-four hours in the life of a teenage slut. How many lacrosse players do you reckon a girl can pleasure in twenty-four hours? Mom, you first.

  Horace, please.

  No, no, come on, give it a go. Two? Five? Ten? Nay, eleven this girl manages. The narrator informs us, in no uncertain terms, that such promiscuity is the result of low self-esteem and an absent father. I like a story that spells out its message, don’t you? Not quite as subtle as a greeting card, perhaps, but—Fortunately for all, we had our esteemed instructor on hand to lead us in the critique. Know what she said? Know what she told the jellyfish brain who wrote that tale? He slurps another beef slice off his fork. The way you describe her crouching alone in the janitor’s closet, pulling her panties back up, is very moving.

  Maybe it was, I say.

  And maybe I am the next Joyce J. Beckett.

  Mom asks, What has she said about your stories?

  Nothing.

  Why not?

  Because I have turned none in. I haven’t been inspired to finish anything. The instructor is not what you’d call inspiring. More like aspiring. To be what, I couldn’t say. While the rest of us are slowing expiring from lack of—

  Shall we change the subject? says Mom.

  And I forgot to tell you, there’s going to be a reading. In, like, early December. The last week of class.

  Oh! That’s lovely. Are your sister and I invited? Mom’s face creaks with the same terrible optimism it did when Horace told her Duke had gotten him a job at the video store. She had no way of knowing my brother would last a total of three days at Slick Flix.

  Family and friends, apple juice and cheddar nips, the works. The yellow-eyed queen of false encouragement wants us to share our literary bounty with those we love.

  On Thanksgiving morning, once the turkey’s in, we watch Mom make sweet-potato pie. It was Dad’s favorite. He composed a song to sing while it baked: Yammy, yammy, golden yammy, tell me why you taste so yummy. Every Thanksgiving since he died, one of us has sung it instead. It’s an embarrassing song and no longer even reminds me of my father. I associate the yams with Horace’s amplifier, which exploded the year he tried to accompany my voice with electric guitar. The amp blew out on the first yummy and a wire of sparks flew across the air and our mother screamed so hard she began to hyperventilate. Horace stalked off to his room—he was living at home that year—to smoke a bowl, leaving me to get our mother breathing again.

  Whose turn is it? Mom asks, sliding the pie onto the rack above the turkey.

  I have a sore throat, says Horace.

  That must make you a little hoarse, I say.

  They stare back at me.

  Get it? Horace—hoarse—get it?

  Got it, unfortunately, my brother says.

  The night of the first Thanksgiving after we moved to the town of few stoplights, he was pulled over at three in the morning. One cop circled the car, dragging the nose of his gun against its sides, while the other cop prepared a breathalyzer.

  Can you, um, not do that? Horace said.

  The cop kept walking very slowly around the car. The gun squeaked along the metal. Horace took his mouth off the nozzle and said, You’re gonna scratch it!

  The cop didn’t stop.

  Please, my brother said, it was my dad’s car.

  The cop lifted the gun so it was pointing at Horace. You think your dad wanted you driving drunk in this car?

  He wouldn’t have minded, declared my brother, as long as I was driving well.

  Our mother stands still at the sink, hands in apron pockets.

  Pie smells good, I say.

  What? Oh. . . . She shakes her staring eyes away from the window and says, Where did your brother go?

  Upstairs. He said he needed to take a nap.

  It’s eleven A.M.

  Want me to check?

  Mom says, I’m just trying to remember what’s in my medicine cabinet.

  He’s got plenty of his own, I want to tell her.

  He’s a bluffer, I want to say.

  Why don’t you check, she nods. And I’ll baste the carcass.

  I knock on the door of the room that was Horace’s for the last two years of high school and again after college until our mother kicked him out. Hor, I call. Hor-house! Hello? Are you dead in there?

  No reply.

  I’m coming in, I say, so cover yourself.

  And I open the door.

  It’s not like the time three years ago, when he got close enough for an ambulance ride (pills). Not like a year ago, when he didn’t get close at all (pills again, but too many; he vomited them up). Not like this past summer, when he didn’t appear to be trying very hard—knifed his wrists the wrong way and they didn’t bleed enough.

  All those times it was me who found him, and I prayed so fast my tongu
e dented the roof of my mouth.

  This time I don’t pray. I have this hard little thought, a stripe of cold, broken lightning: Go ahead.

  I have this relief.

  It only lasts as long as one breath takes to break in a lung. Then I am yelling, Come on! and hollering, You fucker, come on! I punch the mounded blankets, slamming and slamming my fists into the curled lump of him.

  Quit it, Horace says. He wriggles his head out from under the blue knit blanket, and peeks up. Now I’m bruised, he complains.

  You’re a dick.

  It was a joke. He picks the orange bottles off the floor and rattles them at me.

  I watch him back, quiet, until he can’t stand it and looks away. I keep watching. I want my eyes to shoot shame into him, or guilt, or a new conscience that will keep him from ever doing it again. Not the pretending part—the real trying it part. I stare and stare and hope I’m firing beams of living into his brain. Horace wipes a clump of black hair off his face, reaches for his cigarettes on the dresser. Jesus, he says, I’m fine.

  It is common for brothers to knife the heads off sisters’ dolls, but I didn’t know that when I was six. I saw my killed doll and wondered where the blood was. I went sobbing to my father, who was watching his game. Not now, baby, he said, leaning around me to see the screen.

  But Horrible committed murder! I shouted.

  After the game, my brother was goaded into confessing, and because Dad was in a bad mood—his team had probably lost—he smacked him in the face. Horace, bright-lashed with tears, whispered to me: You will never be forgiven.

  Yes I will, I said.

  No, you won’t.

  Yes I will.

  Nope.

  But please?

  Never, Horace said.

  Oh please? Please please please forgive me?

  No matter how much you beg, he said, I will never forgive a tattler.

  I report to our mother: He’s fine.

  Is he? She stirs grated orange peel into a pot of boiling cranberries.

  Just taking a little nap.

  The boy gets far too much sleep, she says.

  The man whose thirtieth birthday is scheduled for the week after Christmas pads downstairs in socks embroidered with little monkeys. A merry noon to ye wenches, he says. Shall I whip up some eggnog?

  I hate eggnog.

  Then what say you, Mother? Wouldn’t you relish a cup of good cheer to inaugurate the holiday season?

  She says, I think it would be nice if nobody drank today.

  Yeah, that sounds nice. That sounds so nice! Have you already dumped out all the liquor? He walks to the sink, peers in, sniffs.

  Melodrama, I accuse.

  My brother squints at me. I stare back. I won’t take my eyes off him. Finally, lightly, he says, You want melodrama, sweetie? Just wait till next Friday. There will be great goddamn truckloads of it to be had.

  What’s next Friday?

  His class reading, Mom reminds me.

  Of course she wouldn’t forget.

  We sit on folding chairs in a sort of rec room with exposed pipes and a troubling reek of foot-vinegar that Horace says is from the yoga classes they hold there. The first reader is a guy with platinum hair and the kind of face I imagine a surfer or woodcutter would have: red, rubbery, confident. My brother whispers to me, His cock is a worm of flab and he relies on medicine to stiffen it—according to the three women in the class who’ve slept with him since September.

  The second student recites a poem about bathing in poison juice that’s gushing from a hole in her arm. After the bath, says the poem, she is finally clean. Revolting glamorizer of drug use, gnashes my brother, that lobotomy-on-legs couldn’t write her way out of the plastic bag I’d like to hold over her head until her lungs collapse.

  I wonder what he would say about me if ever I were to stand at a podium. Tragically boring, he’d explain to whoever was near. She goes to bed early and washes every plate as soon as it’s dirty.

  There’s nothing you like, I hiss.

  I like you, he points out, and peels a long pink strip of skin away from his thumbnail.

  I ask what he’s going to read. Our mother, on the other side of Horace, leans to hear his answer.

  Nothing, he says.

  Mom’s face is a punched-in cake.

  What do you mean? I say.

  I mean nothing, he says. It’s not required by law.

  Then why—

  Did we come? finishes Mom in a little screech.

  Applause rips forth for the revolting glamorizer. Horace shrugs, fists balled clapless on his thighs. What else have the two of you got to do on a Friday night? he says. Answer me that.

  We sit baffled through the rest of the readers. At long last the instructor takes the podium to thank everyone for coming and to say what a great group of writers this has been to work with.

  Lies, Horace whispers.

  She’s pretty, I notice.

  He scowls.

  She’s really pretty.

  If you like that type.

  What type?

  The pretty-enough-to-know-it-and-be-arrogant-about-it type. And beauty doesn’t do her much good if she’s a fool. That is, if her taste in literature is about as refined as a wrecking ball. That is, if she tells that blond moron his shit is compelling when it certainfuckingly is not. Can she be that dumb? Maybe she just wants a taste of his wilted—

  I’ll wait for you outside, Mom says in a tiny voice.

  Horace stares at the podium where the instructor, surrounded by students, is laughing and nodding. Around one finger she twists a strand of shimmery dark hair. My brother watches her, frowning, jaw clenched. He slaps at his jacket for cigarettes, still watching.

  I breathe through my mouth against the foot-vinegar. Ready, Hor?

  Yeah, he says, motionless.

  The instructor starts making her way in our direction. Handshakes and smiles slow her progress. I hear a strangled hum from my brother’s throat—an attempt to clear itself.

  Leaving already? she cries upon reaching us.

  Horace shrugs. I wait in vain to be introduced.

  I can’t believe you didn’t read, she says, why didn’t you read? and she hits him on the shoulder. She is even younger-looking up close.

  He shrugs again.

  Some of us are going out, she says. You should come. If you won’t read, at least you can drink.

  I wait for him to pony up some sarcastic little phrase, but he and his mouth are motionless.

  Okay, well. The instructor reaches up with an elastic band to rein in her splendid hair.

  I think she was flirting with you, I remark in the car.

  Mom snaps to attention. Flirting? Who?

  Don’t be absurd, Horace says.

  At the next Sunday dinner, as we’re gamely swallowing our mother’s stab at West African peanut stew, Horace looks even more depressed than usual. I watch Mom’s glance skitter to his ashy, swollen-eyed face, then dart away before he can yell, You’re wearing a look of pity.

  Goo, she says, what’s bothering you?

  He shrugs. I never got to workshop my story. I had it finished by the last class, but there wasn’t time. We had to discuss the tale of a girl and her horse and then some sci-fi crap.

  You can sign up for another workshop, can’t you? Do they offer a winter session? I’d be happy to cover the cost of a second one, if you—

  Yeah, well, maybe. I have to check who’s teaching.

  There’s a smear of peanut sauce on his chin. Mom reaches to wipe it with her napkin, and I get tears of disgust at the back of my mouth.

  It is too cold to roll down the window even a little, so his cigarette takes over the car. Why do I always let him smoke?

  Can you put that out, it’s getting gross in here.

  Almost done, he says.

  No, will you throw it out now? I can’t breathe.

  Tobacco does not grow on trees.

  This is my car.

  Well, goo
d for you. He takes a last, long, sumptuous drag, cracks the window, and tosses the butt. Here’s one. What does God use to clean his teeth? Wait for it—transcendental floss! He checks to see if I’m smiling. He clears his throat, says, So what do you want for Christmas?

  I don’t know.

  Come on.

  Haven’t thought about it.

  Oh. He gnaws his thumb. Something wrong?

  No.

  Oh.

  We are in front of his apartment building. I rub my forehead with two fingers. He tugs the orange scarf tighter at his mother-wiped chin. When you think of what you want, let me know, he says. Unless it costs a lot.

  Good night, I say.

  I don’t phone or visit my brother for a week. Every day after work I drive straight home.

  My mother calls to ask if I’d like to come over and decorate the tree. I got a very shapely one this year, she says.

  I tell her sure. And has she checked if Horace wants to join us? I could pick him up on my way over—

  No need, she flutters, he’s already here. He just put on the angel.

  Oh, I say, and don’t feel like going anymore.

  It is dark but not late; people are in their houses, cooking, changing out of work clothes, settling in. Horace’s windows are ablaze so I park the car. Gather the takeout cartons. That you? he croaks through the intercom.

  It’s me.

  Jesus Christ, he says.

  The floor is ankle-deep in records and beer cans. He squats in front of the stereo, adjusting knobs. He’s drunk, I gather, from the slowness of his mouth, the droop of his red lids. He says, You can be here, but be quiet.

  What are you doing?

  Making a mix.

  Want some food? I went to Poblano Palace—

  Feh, he says.

  I get one plate, one fork, one square of paper towel from the kitchen. I pour one glass of water. With my dinner spread out on the guitar case, I eat and listen to Horace choose songs. He keeps shaking his head, rewinding. He writes each title carefully on the back of an envelope.

  This is a fucking great tune, he remarks over his shoulder. Don’t you think? Shit, it’s great.

  I chomp rice and guacamole.

  And the one before, too. In fact this whole mix is great. I would go so far as to say killer? Alas, no ears shall appreciate.