I started to answer him, but I can’t remember what I meant to say, because that was when Esau hit me. Not with his fists, but with such a blast of—I still don’t know what to call it... hatred? Contempt? Plain meanness?—that it knocked me off my feet and right over my chair. For a moment I swear I thought I’d caught on fire. My head wouldn’t work; nothing worked; it was like every single string in my body had been cut—I couldn’t even flop around on the floor. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know what I was.
Susie screamed, and Esau hit me again. That time I did flop around, after I slid across the floor and fetched up against the wall. To this day I can’t honestly explain how it felt—been trying to describe it to myself for years. Best I can do is that it wasn’t like an electric shock, and it wasn’t really like being burned, or beaten up either, although I was all over bruises next day. It was more... it was more like he was unmaking me, like he was starting to take me apart, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, so I wouldn’t exist anymore—I wouldn’t ever have existed, he’d never have had a brother. I could feel it happening, and I tell you, I’ll never be scared of anything again.
But I didn’t die. I mean, I didn’t get lost, the way he wanted me to. Susie ran to me, but I managed to wave her off, because I didn’t want her getting caught between us. Esau went on hammering me with whatever it was he had that let him smash planes out of the sky, trains off the tracks, set mudslides boiling down on little mud villages. But it wasn’t hurting me anymore, not like it had been. I was still me. He hadn’t been able to make me not be, you understand?
I got my back against the wall and pushed myself up till I was on my feet. Took more time than you might think—I work, I don’t work out—and anyway Esau just kept at me, like point-blank, coming close up to me now and knocking me this way and that, one belt of crazy rage after another. I couldn’t do much about it yet, but he couldn’t quite put me down again, either.
I did tell him to stop it. Same way he warned me, I told him to stop. But he wouldn’t.
So I stopped him. Or the thing stopped him, the thing that had been rousing up in me all this time, while he was whupping the daylights out of me. It burst out of me like from a flamethrower, searing me—mouth, throat, chest, guts—way worse than anything Esau’d done to me, and slamming me back against the wall harder than he had. I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t hear a thing, and right that moment, that’s when I did think I was going to die. Looked forward to it, too, just then.
When my eyes cleared some—ears took a lot longer—I saw Esau lying on the floor. He wasn’t moving.
If it was just me, the way I was feeling, I’d likely have left him lying there till the neighbors started complaining. But... see, I already told you how Willa and me, we were always supposed to watch over our baby brother—protect him in those schoolyard fights, make sure he did his homework, all that—and I guess old habits die hard. I said, “Esau? Esau?” and when he didn’t answer, I tried to get to him, but he seemed an awful long way off. Susie helped me. She’d been crying, but she stopped, and she got me to Esau.
He was trying to sit up by the time we reached him, and we helped him onto his feet in a while. He looked like pounded shit, excuse my French, what with his nice shirt in rags, and that tie Susie liked gone, and an arm of his suit jacket dangling by a few threads. I’d seen him wear that same jacket on the TV, I don’t know how many times. His face was gray. I don’t mean pale, or white—it was gray like old cement, old grout, and it was like the gray went all the way through. Susie and me, we might be the only people in the world ever saw him like that.
He actually tried to smile. He said, “I should have made you check your guns at the door. Where on earth did you pick up that trick?”
“Just got pissed off,” I said. “And I’ll do worse if you’re not out of here in two minutes by Papa’s watch. Susie stays.”
Esau shrugged, or he tried to. “Got to catch a plane tomorrow, anyway. Back to the old grindstone.” He looked at Susie. She kind of edged behind my shoulder some, and Esau’s smile widened. He said, “Don’t worry, my dear. You really should have stayed dead, you know, but it’s not your fault.” He turned back toward me. “Your doing, of course.”
“Watching those folks pile in,” I told him. My head was still ringing. “That whole crew, all those people come to paint up your homecoming for the world to see. Couldn’t help thinking there ought to be someone like Susie there too. Like Donnie Schmidt. I swear, I was just thinking on it.”
“Glad it wasn’t Donnie who showed up,” Esau murmured. He tugged on the loose arm of his ruined jacket; it came free, and he dropped it on the floor. “Sneaky old Brother Jake,” he said. “You’ve likely got more of the family inheritance than I do. Just like in Papa’s Bible, after all.”
I was still feeling hollowed-out, burned-out, not by anything he’d done, but by whatever it was I’d had to do. I said, “I can’t let you go on, Esau.”
He smiled. “You can’t kill me, Jake. We both know you better than that.”
“You might not know me well enough,” I said. “Gone as long as you’ve been. There’s worse things than killing you. Maybe way worse.”
And he saw. He looked into my eyes, for a change, and he saw what I had it in mind to do. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said in a whisper. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“I wouldn’t dare not do it,” I answered him straight. “You’re a time bomb, Esau, you’re a loaded gun. Didn’t matter before, when I could pretend I didn’t really know—but now, if I don’t take the bullets out of you, I’m as bad you are. Can’t see that I’ve got a choice.”
He’s Esau. He didn’t beg, and he didn’t bother with threatening. All he said was, “It won’t be easy for you. It’s my life you’re talking about. I’ll fight you for it.”
“I know you will,” I said. “And you’ll have a better chance than Donnie Schmidt.”
“Or me,” Susie said, standing right next to me. “Goodbye, Esau.”
He gave her a different kind of smile than he’d given me—practically kind, practically real. It looked nice on him. He said, “Goodbye, Susie. See you on the six o’clock.” And he was away, that fast, vanished into the dark. I looked after him for some while, then said what I had to say, and closed the door.
Susie had heard me, of course. “He always meant to be a good God,” I told her. “A good God, a good angel, whatever. Don’t know how he got to be... what he was.”
Susie picked up Esau’s torn-off sleeve and turned it around and around in her hands, not looking at it, not looking at anything much. She said finally, “I read once, in India they’ve got gods that are also demons. Depends on their mood, I guess, or the time of year. Or maybe just their lunch.”
“Well, I wasn’t planning to go into the god business myself,” I told her. “Really wasn’t looking to set up in competition with any Angel of Death. Piss-poor job, you ask me. No benefits, no paid vacations. And damn sure no union.”
Susie shook her head and laughed a little bit, but after that she got quiet again, and sort of broody. By and by, she said, “There’s a union. There’s always been others like you, Jake. The ones who mend the world.”
“The world’s no torn shirt,” I said. My insides felt like they’d been scooped out, dragged over gravel and put back. “I got a store to run.” Susie looked at me, didn’t say anything. I said, “There’s others like him out there, I don’t know how many. Can’t stop them all.” I put my hand on Susie’s shoulder to steady myself.
Willa came in behind us in her bathrobe, looked around at the dining room, and demanded, “What was all that tarryhooting around in here after we went to bed? Did you and Esau get to wrestling or something?”
“Kind of,” I mumbled. “Boys with beers. I’ll clean up, I promise.”
Willa shrugged. “Your house. I was just afraid you’d wake up the kids. Esau already gone?” I nodded, and she peered at me in that older-sister way of hers. “You sure nothing happened betwee
n you two?” She wasn’t expecting an answer, so I didn’t have to fix one up. She studied Susie a lot more closely and carefully than she’d done during dinner, and there wasn’t any question what she was thinking. But what Willa thinks and what Willa says never did spend a lot of time together. This time she just said, “Good of you to take the time with Ben, Susie. I was just frazzled out, dealing with those crazy TV people and Carol-Ann.”
“It’s been some time since I’ve been around children,” Susie said. “I like yours.”
Willa said, “Stay the night, why don’t you? It’s late, and there’s a spare bedroom downstairs.” As she left, she said over her shoulder, “And I make great Mexican eggs. My husband loves them, and he’s Mexican.”
Susie looked at me. I said, “If you aren’t worried about compromising your reputation, that is, staying over in the house of a widower man. There’s still folks in this town would raise their eyebrows.”
Susie laughed full-out then, for the first time. That was nice. She said, “I’m older than I look.”
Well.
What else? The network never ran that show, of course, what with one thing another. Didn’t get the chance. Seems like it all started turning bad for Esau, just about then, slow but steady. That stock-option business. Those people who sued the whole network about his fouled-up dirty bomb story. The sexual harassment charges. Those got settled out of court, like a bunch of other stuff, but there was a mountain landing on his head and he couldn’t duck it all. Still, he hung on like a bullrider. He’s almost as stubborn as I am. Almost.
Tell the truth, he might have ridden that bull all the way home, if he’d still been selling the same kind of stories. But the things that had made him who he was, the big disasters and the common-man nightmares, somehow there just weren’t as many of them as there had been. The news got smaller, and so did he.
Did I feel bad? Interesting, you asking me that. Yeah, I did feel bad for him, I couldn’t help it. I still wonder how he felt when he woke up—the morning after the night he told the country all about those Kansas cult-murders, with the ritual mutilating and all—only it turned out they hadn’t ever happened, even though he’d made them up just as pretty and scary as all the other lies he’d always made real. How’s the Angel of Death supposed to do his job with clipped wings?
I got a call in the store that day. Picked up on the second ring, but when I said hello there wasn’t anybody on the line.
The guns were the last straw. The automatics and the Uzis and whatever in his office, in the dressing-room, those were bad enough, the tabloids had a field day with those. But trying to go through Los Angeles airport security with a pistol butt just sticking out of his coat pocket... lord, that did him in. Network hustled him out of there so fast, his desk was smoking behind him. That wasn’t me, by the way, all those guns. That was just the state he was in by then. Poor Esau. All those years jumping off things, he still never did learn how to land.
Or maybe I should have chosen my words better as he walked away that night. Probably would have, if I’d had more time. All I knew then was I had to speak up before he did. Jam my foot in the door.
“My brother thinks he’s an angel,” I’d said. “He thinks he can change anything in the world just by saying so. But that’s crazy. He can’t do that.”
Didn’t know what else to say. Might have had a little too much what we used to call English on it, but I done what I could.
Lord, don’t I wish I had a movie of you for the last half-hour or so, the way you’ve been looking at me. You’d get to keep that, anyway, even though there won’t be nothing on your tape tomorrow, nor nothing in your memory. Couple of hours, you couldn’t even find this house again, same as your editor won’t ever remember giving out this assignment. Because nobody talks about my brother anymore. Nobody’s talked about him in years. And it’s a sad thing, some ways, because being Esau Robbins every night, everywhere, six o’clock... that mattered to him. Being the Angel of Death, that mattered to him. They were the only things that ever filled him, you understand me? That’s all he ever could do in his life, my poor damn brother—get even with us, with people, for being alive. And I took all that away. Stole his birthright and shut down the life he built with it. That don’t balance the scales, nor make up for all he did, but it’s going to have to do.
Esau Robbins no longer exists. He’s not dead. He’s just... gone. Maybe someday I’ll go and look for him, like an older brother should, but right now gone is how it stays. Price of the pottage.
Thanks for the Blanton’s, young man. Puts a smile on my face, and even though it isn’t her drink Susie will certainly applaud your thoughtfulness.
You’ll likely be finding a bonus in your next paycheck. Nobody in accounting will be able to explain why—and you sure as hell won’t, either—but just you roll with it.
THE TALE OF JUNKO AND SAYURI
I can’t claim to know Japan. I don’t speak the language, I have only a smattering of the history, literature, and mythology, and I’ve only been there once, in the mid-1980s. But during that visit I met an old man in a small town: a celebrated woodcarver officially designated as a National Treasure, who spoke no English and loved jazz (we jammed a little together, him on saxophone and me on guitar). He sold me a carving that I still have, and which partly inspired this story of shapeshifting and true natures.
In japan, very, very, long ago, when almost anybody you met on the road might turn out to be a god or a demon, there was a young man named Junko. That name can mean “genuine” in Japanese, or “pure,” or “obedient,” and he was all of those things then. He served the great daimyo Lord Kuroda, lord of much of southern Honshu, as Chief Huntsman, and was privileged to live in the lord’s castle itself, rather than in any of the outer structures, the yagura. In addition, he was handsome and amiable, and all the ladies of the court were aware of him. But he had no notion of this, which only added to his charm. He was a very serious young man.
He was also a commoner, born of the poorest folk in a poor village, which meant that he had not the right even to a family name, nor even to be called Junko-san as a mark of respect. In most courts of that time, he would never have been permitted to look straight into the eyes of a samurai, let alone to live so intimately among them. But the Lord Kuroda was an unusual man, with his own sense of humor, his own ideas of what constituted a samurai, and with a doubtless lamentable tendency to treat everyone equally. This was generally blamed on his peculiar horoscope.
Now at this time, it often seemed as though half of Japan were forever at war with the other half. The mighty private armies of the daimyos marched and galloped up and down the land, leaving peasant villages and great fortresses alike smoldering behind them as they pleased. The shogun at Kyoto might well issue his edicts from time to time, but the shogunate had not then the power that it was to seize much later; so for the most part his threats went unheeded, and no peace treaty endured for long. The Lord Kuroda held himself and his own people aside from war as much as he could, believing it tedious, pointless and utterly impractical, but even he found it wise to keep an army of retainers. And the poor in other less fortunate prefectures replanted and built their houses again, and said among themselves that Buddha and the kami—the many gods of Shinto—alike slept.
One cold winter, when game was particularly scarce, Junko went out hunting for his master. Friends would gladly have come with him, but everyone knew that Junko preferred to hunt alone. He was polite about it, as always, but he felt that the other courtiers made too much noise and frightened away the winter-white deer and rabbits and wild pigs that he was stalking. He himself moved as quietly—even pulling a sledge behind him—as any fish in a stream, or any bird in the air, and he never came home empty-handed.
On this day, as Amaterasu, the sun, was drowsing down the western sky, Junko also was starting back to the Lord Kuroda’s castle. His sledge was laden with a fat stag, and a pig as well, and Junko knew that another kill would load the sledge to
o heavily for his strength. All the same, he could not resist loosing one last arrow at a second wild pig that had broken the ice on a frozen stream, and was greedily drinking there, ignoring everything but the water. It was too good a chance to pass up, and Junko stood very still, took a deep breath—then let it out, just a little bit, as archers will do—and let his arrow fly.
It may have been that his hands were cold, or that the pig moved slightly at the last moment, or even that the growing twilight deceived Junko’s eye, though that seems unlikely. At all events, he missed his mark—the arrow hissed past the pig’s left ear, sending the animal off in a panicky scramble through the brush, out of sight and range in an instant—but he hit something. Something at the very edge of the water gave a small, sad cry, thrashed violently in the weeds there for a moment, and then fell silent and still.
Junko frowned, annoyed with himself; he had been especially proud of the fact that he never needed more than one arrow to bring down his prey. Well, whatever little creature he had accidentally wounded, it was his duty to put it quickly out of its pain, since an honorable man should never inflict unnecessary suffering. He went forward carefully, his boots sinking into the wet earth.
He found it lying half-in, half-out of the stream: an otter, with his arrow still in his flank. It was conscious, but not trying to drag itself away—it only looked at him out of dazed dark eyes and made no sound, not even when he knelt beside it and drew his knife to cut its throat. It looked at him—nothing more.
“It would be such a pity to ruin such fur with blood,” he thought. “Perhaps I could make a tippet out of it for my master’s wife.” He put the knife away slowly and lifted the otter in his arms, preparing to break its neck with one swift twist. The otter’s sharp teeth could surely have taken off a finger through the heavy mittens, but it struggled not at all, though Junko could feel the captive heart beating wildly against him. When he closed his free hand on the creature’s neck, the panting breath, so softly desperate, made his wrist tingle strangely.
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